To: Jock Hutchinson who wrote (14962 ) 9/12/1998 3:27:00 PM From: patrick tang Read Replies (1) | Respond to
Jock, my comment on StrongArm was not based on technical knowledge about computer arch. but rather on time to market. Product cycles are getting downright freightening. In PCs, it's probably about 6 months! The design I was talking about was a 32 bit microcontroller to be used be automibile engine control. The ultimate hope was a very low cost chip. However, if I were the car maker, I would not sit around waiting chip for year and a half. I would just use some existing chip that already has all the proven software etc. Hence designing big chips like that from the ground up is not practical even though the end design may be very elequent - just take too much time. Hence the existance of customer midifiable building blocks that LSI has is of great value. Witness the last design win at some company that I forgot, CISCO perhaps. LSI did the design in 5 weeks!. No, the chip was probably 50% bigger in chip area than necessary, probably can only be rev. up to 75% of the mHz ultimately possible, but they got to market pronto instead of waiting around for a year.
