The idea of an open-source CPU core was virtually unheard-of ten years ago – let alone using it for commercial applications. The CPU core has been the most critical part of any computing system and thus, has been the most valuable and profitable. Over the years, companies like IBM®, Intel® and ARM® have built their empires either from CPU core development or license distribution.

Fast forward to today, the entire computing industry is in the early stages of a new paradigm shift where the CPU would no longer be the central processing unit. Mainly driven by the exploding growth of data that we produce and consume as a global society, even the highly successful von Neumann architecture is becoming obsolete. There is big data used for prediction, analytics and machine learning training, and there is fast data used for real-time applications such as IoT edge, geo-spatial systems and autonomous vehicles.
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