"You think these developments happen overnight"
No, I don't think these things happen overnight, but it's been three years. But how many months did it take for Intel to actually talk to ARM about a license? Why did it take so long for the SA1100 and SA1110 to actually make it to market? What did happen to the SA1500? All of these were in working silicon, the SA1100 was even being shipped before the handover of the fab, but it was stopped. I have a Brutus board that came from DEC, I know the SA1100 was available at least in samples from before the handover. So they knew what to do with it, but they didn't sell chips for almost a year? This makes sense to you? Yeah, I know the ways of marketing can be inscrutable, but...
All of that happened a while ago, remember the bulk of the StrongArm team walked when Intel took over, started a new company (Alchemy), and did a mew design with a new architecture (MIPS) that is competitive with the XScale, in processor power and power consumption. And it's availability is is probably better than XScale, as far as I can tell there are some samples for XScale, but development boards are still not available.
Note: I know that the SA-110 was available, there were existing contracts for those. |
