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Sun Microsystems might have open sourced the design of its multicore "Niagara" Sparc T1 processor under the OpenSparc
project, but that doesn't mean that its newly established and
free-standing Microelectronics group doesn't want to make money selling
intellectual property. Sun most certainly does want to do that, and
today it inked a deal with British embedded chip maker ARM, the first of what the company hopes will be many such deals.
ARM chips are 32-bit RISC processors that were originally created by a
company called Acorn Computers, which has a long history in embedded
processing. An Advanced RISC Machine chip was used in the ill-fated
granddaddy of modern mobile computing devices, the Apple Computer
Newton; the former Digital equipment licensed the ARM intellectual
property to create a variant of the chip called StrongARM, and Intel used to have an ARM variant for embedded devices called XScale, until it sold the business to chip maker Marvell
in June 2006. Suffice it to say, ARM chips are used in all kinds of
embedded devices where power consumption is a big issue, such as in
cell phones and other mobile gear as well as in myriad other embedded
devices--even sometimes in a RAID disk controllers, but as the brains
inside of disk drives or routers.
ARM, the company, does not make chips, but rather licenses the cores
and related tools that allow others to design and possibly manufacture
their own variants of the ARM architecture. Many of the companies that
do produce ARM chips go to third parties to actually fabricate their
processors--much as Sun itself goes to Texas Instruments to deliver its Sparc processors for its workstations and servers.
The one thing that ARM needs, therefore, is a big bag of tricks to keep
the ARM architecture relevant. Manufacturers of embedded and mobile
devices are facing the same conflicting issues as server
makers--companies want more performance, but they want chips and the
systems they build using them to consume less power. To that end,
according to Marc Tremblay, Sun's chief technology officer, ARM is
buying a license to a package of several hundred patents relating to
Sun's chips and related technologies that spans back to 1995. While
Tremblay is not specific about exactly what ARM has acquired, he says
that it includes patents relating to the first-generation UltraSparc-I
chips, as well as the picoJava and MAJC Java processors that Sun
developed but did not successfully commercialize. ARM has also taken
some IP related to the future 16-core "Rock" Sparc RK processors as
well as to the Niagara chips, with particular emphasis on multicore and
multithreading architectures. Tremblay says that ARM has also picked up
some patents relating to graphics, I/O, memory management, and power
management as well.
"ARM has been a partner of Sun's for many years," said Tremblay,
referring to the chip multithreading architecture that is at the heart
of the Niagara and Rock processors. "This broadens the ecosystem for
CMT, and that is a critical objective for Sun."
Sun and ARM did not disclose the value of the deal, but Tremblay said
that it was "not thousands of dollars, and it was not billions,
either."
Read the original article: http://www.itjungle.com/breaking/bn051507-story01.html |
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