ARM Unfolds Road Map
Santa Clara, Calif.–ARM executives unfurled a multi-market road map at the ARM Developer’s Conference this week for the company’s processor cores, intellectual property and software across a wide range of markets.
On the Web 2.0 front, the company is shipping its Cortex-A9 processor to leading customers, based upon the ARMv7 architecture. The company continues to ship the Cortex-A8 as its volume processor.
Simon Segars, executive vice president and general manager of ARM’s Physical IP Division, said the A9 will be able to handle greater complexity in mobile Internet devices, including Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight Web browser. Segars said it logical to assume there also will be an ARMv8 at some point, but did not give details.
Segars noted there is a difference between synthesized performance and optimized performance. The synthesized version of the A8 runs at 800MHz, while the optimized performance runs at 1.1GHz. “Developing application-optimized physical IP will result in better performance and lower power,” he said.
ARM contends the A8 will outperform rival Intel’s Atom processor at the same frequency, while running Atom at twice the clock speed only results in a 25 percent boost in power and uses significantly more power. Moreover, the Atom processor will burn up without a heat sink, executives said.
ARM also is pushing down into the graphics processor world with its Mali graphics processor units, which currently are being licensed by companies such as Broadcom, Cisco, NXP and STMicroelectronics. ARM has developed a complete stack including the processor, drivers, middleware and developer tools, said Michael Dimelow, director of marketing for ARM’s Media Processor Division, and will continue pushing down the size and power requirements of the chip in future generations.
Dimelow said there has been a lot of interest among companies for using the GPU as a general processor because of its energy efficiency.
Finally, the company is heavily leveraging the AMBA architecture ecosystem in SoC design, building in adaptive verification IP and Coresight, ARM’s on-chip debug utility. Keith Clarke, VP and general manager of ARM’s Fabric IP Processor Division, said the company’s adaptive verification IP will be able to inject realistic traffic patterns into chip design and allow developers to make tradeoffs involving latency and power.
–Ed Sperling
