Michael S (already5chosen@yahoo.com) on 10/1/09 wrote:
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>Did Moto/Freescale or TI ever design their own ARM core? I don't remember anything
>like that.

I'm 95% sure that Freescale doesn't have any custom ARM designs. According to the marketing brochures, their i.MX series of processors just use standard ARM cores. I don't know about TI. If they aren't using a custom core in OMAP, I don't think they'd bother at all. Here's a list of ARM cores which they've used:

http://www.arm.com/community/display_product/rw/ProductId/2015/

> Assuming they didn't, why would they need an Architecture License esp. if it is so damn expensive?

Why do big companies waste money? Because they're big companies. The licenses were probably cheap when Freescale/TI acquired them, though. In the late 1990s, ARM's primary market was cell phones, whereas MIPS was playing in a higher-end market (Nintendo 64, Playstation). If I were ARM, I would have been encouraging big semiconductor companies to help bring ARM in to this high-end market by providing discounted architecture licenses.