The IP companies creep toward an SoC

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

by Jon Peddie, Jon Peddie Research, Oct. 22, 2015 – 

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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