Synopsys is undergoing a massive reset. Where not so long ago, it self-identified as the largest EDA company in the world, other words are now used to describe the enterprise: “Synopsys is at the forefront of Smart, Secure Everything with the world’s most advanced tools for silicon chip design, verification, IP integration, and application security testing.”

As compelling as that description may be, some observers are questioning whether the marked differences between maintaining expertise in chip design, verification, IP, and IP integration versus maintaining expertise in software integrity are too wide to make for easy co-habitation under one corporate roof.

Some would say putting EDA and chip design together with software security is not a good recipe for the long-term success of the company. But are these critics correct?

At the ESD Alliance panel on the Cadence campus Wednesday night, it was Vista Ventures’ Jim Hogan who suggested the little open-source processor architecture called RISC-V will prove itself to be a plucky survivor when looming market realities hit 800-pound proprietary vendors like ARM and Intel. Hogan suggested RISC-V is positioned to survive that pending apocalypse just like “the mammals after the asteroid.”

Pretty dramatic stuff.

Hence it should not have been surprising, at the end of the 75-minute discussion on stage between Jim Hogan and Microsemi’s Ted Speers and SiFive’s Yunsup Lee, that I raised my hand and asked why Simon Segars was not in the room. After all, Simon Segars is both CEO of ARM and a key member of the Board of the Alliance that organized the Hogan-Speers-Lee program – a program where the emerging RISC-V movement was described as poised to upend the primacy of ARM etc.

Hogan responded to my question without answering: “Look, ARM is challenging by serving the low-cost processor market. License fees, royalty fees – that is what ARM wants for their low-power edge-based device. I think it was Simon, for example, who started talking to The Street about his economic strategy. It’s not really about what the best technology is, but about the economics. This is what gets the traction, and ARM will respond in an economic way.”

“Yes,” Ted Speers added, “and Intel and Imagination will also respond.”

I have often talked about the process that might be applied to the selection of an embedded operating system and I hope that I can provide some guidance. However, developers tend to stick with a specific OS [or, at least, with a particular OS vendor] – recent research suggested that only about 20% of developers anticipated a change of OS for their next project.

I started thinking about why there is this apparently high degree of loyalty …