The IP companies creep toward an SoC

Jon Peddie, Jon Peddie Research
October 22, 2015

To build a truly heterogeneous SoC, you need at least four processors

The announcement of VeriSilicon’s acquisition of Vivante heats up the IP space, and puts pressure on Synopsys (which recently acquire Viralogic, which previously acquired ARC) to get a GPU, and VeriSilicon to get a CPU, so they can compete across the board with ARM and Imagination Technologies.

Synopsys has the ARC CPU, a RISC design not too dissimilar from ARM (and also developed in Cambridge). VeriSilicon has a DSP (LSI’s ZSP), but neither Synopsys, ARM, nor Imagination has a separate DSP core, although ARM (which added DSP extensions in the Cortex-M7), Imagination, and Synopsys have some DSP capabilities. And only Imagination and VeriSilicon have an ISP core, while Synopsys has an embedded vision processor as well as integrated ARC-based IP subsystems, and VeriSilicon has a new vision processor (VP), which is a new and growing category of dedicated processors for automotive and IoT platforms

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