Items tagged with Cortex
Last week, Arm showed off the inner workings of its new Machine Learning Processor design, but that is not all that company had waiting in the wings. Arm is also detailing more cutting-edge technology in the form of its Cortex-A76 CPU, Mali-G76 GPU, and Mali-V76 VPU designs. All three chips are slated to be heavy-hitters in their respective categories, and thanks to some on-campus, in depth briefings earlier this month, we have all of the details to share... Cortex A-76 The Cortex-A76 represents Arm’s most radical overhaul over previous designs. The A76’s brand-new architecture brings decisive improvements to power and efficiency. Arm’s processor engineers worked with a...
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It could be said that ARM chips are what help make the world go ‘round these days, at least in terms of mobile and embedded applications. And ARM is back at it again with with a next generation of its Cortex-R Series real-time processor architecture. The British multinational semiconductor IP company has unveiled the new Cortex-R8, which offers a number of significant improvements over its Cortex-R7 predecessor (released in 2011). The new architecture is targeted at extremely low latency processing, much like the previous gen, but with a number of key enhancements and features for critical real-time processing applications. For starters, ARM says the the Cortex-R8 provides twice the performance...
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Huawei may not be a household name here in the US, nor does the brand name roll off the tongue easily for many Americans, but you might be surprised to learn that the Chinese networking and telecommunications manufacturer is the 3rd largest smartphone supplier in the world, behind Apple and Samsung. Much of that global market share comes from China, but the company has been making significant inroads here in the US with devices like Google's Nexus 6P, which is a Huawei private labeled device. Further, like Samsung and Apple, Huawei has access to significant manufacturing capabilities, including their own semiconductor design house called HiSilicon, which is a wholly owned subsidiary. In...
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If you purchased a higher-end smartphone in the past two years, chances are good that it has an SoC under its hood that packs ARM's ARMv8 architecture. It's what made 64-bit mobile processors possible, and with that comes increased performance as well as the ability to utilize lots of memory, among other processing efficiencies. Today, it's not hard to find ARMv8 in even modest smartphones, some of which could cost under $100. But in emerging markets, the architecture has been nonexistent. This is a problem ARM is planning to solve. It plans to do that with its brand new Cortex-A35, a microarchitecture that aims for ultra high efficiency and will target the "next billion smartphone users...
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Razer today confirmed reports that it has acquired OUYA's software assets, including its content catalog and online retail platform. As part of the deal, OUYA's technical team and developer relations staff will join the software team at Razer and begin working on a long-term plan for its Android TV efforts, including Android-based consoles. The acquisition is a play for software and personnel only -- Razer did not buy OUYA's hardware or other related assets. However, the company does plan to publish Android TV content and Android-based TV console games under the OUYA brand as a separate interest. "Razer has a long-term vision for Android TV and Android-based TV consoles, such as the Xiaomi Mi...
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Cambridge, UK-based ARM doesn’t just supply the processor architecture that powers the majority of our smartphones and tablets (along with numerous other IoT devices), but its products also help to power safety, control, and infotainment systems in the vehicles that we all drive — well, that is if your vehicle isn’t already driving you thanks to rapid advances in autonomous technology. ARM has already managed to incorporate its Cortex-A, Cortex-M, and Cortex-R architectures into vehicles to power blind spot detection, 360-degree surround views (Nissan/Infiniti is deeply invested in this technology), automatic parking, automatic braking, automatic cruise control, collision avoidance, and lane-keeping....
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It has been nearly a year since we visited ARM in Cambridge, UK, and the company recently held another tech day -- this time in Austin, Texas. During the three-day session, ARM covered a wide range of topics, with a primary focus on server ecosystems and next-generation mobile hardware. The company started off with an in-depth exploration of its CCN-508 server interconnect, but also taked about "Project Moonshot," an initiative to build a dense server product around ARM and x86 cores. Partners like HP, Canonical, and Red Hat were also on hand to take software and servers. And ARM also noted that 2014 will be the year that Android starts to seriously make an effort in 64-bit eveolution. Benchmark...
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It has been nearly a year since we visited ARM in Cambridge, UK, and the company recently held another tech day -- this time in Austin, Texas. During the three-day session, ARM covered a wide range of topics, with a primary focus on server ecosystems and next-generation mobile hardware. The company started off with an in-depth exploration of its CCN-508 server interconnect. AMD and Intel don't really have an analogous chip to this -- think of the CCN-508 as the hub that all other CPUs, GPUs, network interfaces, CPU cache, and other components connect to. Click to Enlarge ARM has revealed details on the CCN-508 before, but the company was emphasizing its server chops at Austin, talking...
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Last week, we paid a visit to ARM's headquarters in Cambridge, England and sat down with the company for multiple deep dives into its structure, processor architecture, and the future of its product design. The semiconductor market for mobile and hand-held devices has changed dramatically in the past six years and ARM has had to evolve alongside it. This is the first in a series of articles designed to profile different aspects of the company and its competition with Intel... ARMs Race: Licensing vs. Manufacturing In Mobile...
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Last week, we paid a visit to ARM's headquarters in Cambridge, England and sat down with the company for multiple deep dives into its structure, processor architecture, and the future of its product design. The semiconductor market for mobile and hand-held devices has changed dramatically in the past six years and ARM has had to evolve along side it. This is the first in a series of articles designed to profile different aspects of the company and its competition with Intel. ARM's Licensing and Design Model Most readers are aware that ARM has a very different business model than Intel. Specifically, ARM licenses a wide range of technologies in a vast number of markets. The majority of...
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While Intel is the king of the PC, competitor ARM is arguably the king of mobile, and the latter is apparently further securing its crown with a new optimized IP solution that’s designed for use in midrange mobile devices. ARM executives went so far as to tell TechHive that their offerings are a generation ahead of Intel’s. Assuming that’s true, it’s especially bad news for Intel because the chipmaker just launched its new 22nm Atom solution. ARM’s latest consists of an a Cortex-A12 processor with a Mali-T622 GPU and a Mali -V500 (which is a multi-core video solution that, among other things, fast encoding/decoding to better handle higher-resolution content). ARM's...
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ARM debuted its new 64-bit microarchitecture today and announced the upcoming launch of a new set of Cortex processors, due in 2014. The two new chips, dubbed the Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57, are the most advanced CPUs the British company has ever designed, and are integral to AMD's plans to drive dense server applications beginning in 2014. When AMD designed x86-64, its engineers took the opportunity to remove some cruft from the venerable IA-32 standard and cleaned up the implementation while maintaining backward compatibility. With ARMv8, ARM has done something similar. The ARMv7 uarch was designed to scale across three different markets with very different needs as far as power consumption...
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ARM and GlobalFoundries have been working together ever since AMD spun GlobalFoundries off as an independent business, but the two companies are taking steps to further expand their joint development efforts. As part of the deal, ARM has committed to creating a "full platform of ARM Artisan® Physical IP, including standard cell libraries, memory compilers and POP™ IP solutions." We typically discuss ARM as selling licenses to various companies like Samsung, Texas Instruments, and Nvidia, but licenses aren't the company's only product. When ARM talks about physical IP, it's referring to all the other components that go into the SoC and make it tick. Need an L2 cache implementation, a...
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ARM's been in the news quite a bit lately, most recently in dealing with Windows RT, but now they're making some waves of their own. They've just announced the new Cortex-A15 quad-core Hard Macro, a power-optimized implementation of quad-core hard macro on 28nm process. In other words, it's a juiced-up version of the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor. It's engineered to run at 2GHz and deliver performance in excess of 20,000DMIPS, while maintaining the power efficiency of the Cortex-A9 hard macro. The low leakage implementation, featuring integrated NEON SIMD technology and floating point (VFP), is said to deliver "an extremely competitive balance of performance and power and is ideal for wide array...
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The world's most energy-efficient processor from ARM? Yep, it's here, and it's the Cortex-M0+, aimed at low-cost MCU, sensor and control markets but destined to shake up way more than that. The company is calling it the "world's most energy-efficient microprocessor." In other words, it has been optimized to deliver ultra low-power, low-cost MCUs for intelligent sensors and smart control systems in a broad Tjrange of applications including home appliances, white goods, medical monitoring, metering, lighting and power and motor control devices. he 32-bit Cortex-M0+ processor, the latest addition to the ARM Cortex processor family, consumes just 9µA/MHz on a low-cost 90nm LP process, around...
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Texas Instruments has posted a new video at YouTube that claims to show a dual-core OMAP5-based Cortex-A15 at 800MHz beating the snot out of an unspecified "commercially available" 1.3GHz quad-core device. Given that the only quad-core Tegra 3 tablet available is Asus Transformer Prime, it's not exactly hard to put two and two together. The Transformer Prime is extremely well-regarded, but there've already been rumors that the chip doesn't pack enough horsepower; Asus' highest-end TF700T, with its 1900x1200 screen, reportedly relies on a Qualcomm solution due to Tegra 3's limited memory bandwidth. At first glance, the TI video seems to confirm that. Both devices use Ice Cream Sandwich and are...
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Fresh news out of Taiwan is that Intel and AMD, despite their keen interest in the tablet market, "cannot compete with solutions from ARM in terms of price." The statements, purportedly from various notebook manufacturers, are meant to imply that the two manufacturers (especially Intel) must reduce costs if they ever hope to gain any traction in the market. Then the article at DigiTimes coughs up this gem: "Intel debuted 32nm-based Medfield processors with power consumption reduced to 11W to match Android 4.0 in January 2012 and will launch Atom processors with power consumption of less than 10W specifically for use in smartphones and tablet PCs in the second half of 2012, the sources indicated."...
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Move over, Cortex-A8; the Cortex-A7 is here, and it makes you look fat and slow by comparison. The ARM Cortex A-7 purports to be five times as efficient and one-fifth the size of the Cortex-A8. It’s also built on the 28nm process and should deliver better performance than the A8. ARM is taking an interesting approach with this chip. On its own, the Cortex-A7 will run sub-$100 entry-level smartphones, which are aimed at developing markets. (Look for those sometime in 2013-2014.) However, ARM also plans to pair the A7 with the high-powered Cortex-A15 MPCore on higher-end phone, too. This dual-chip setup, made possible by ARM’s big.LITTLE processing, will put two chips in one device....
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Over the past seven months or so, NVIDIA has revealed a number of details regarding its upcoming mobile wonder-chip, codenamed Kal-El. According to information provided by NVIDIA dating all the way back to February, Kal-El was to be the world’s first mobile quad-core SoC, sporting an integrated 12-core GeForce GPU, with support for resolutions up to 2560x1600, and performance that’s roughly 5x that of the current Tegra 2. News out of NVIDIA today, however, reveals that Kal-El actually has 5 CPU cores, four high-performance cores for general processing duties a low-power “companion” core that’ll only be used for background tasks, active standby, and for...
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Earlier this year, Intel software VP Renee James caused a kerfluffle between himself and Microsoft when he claimed Microsoft's upcoming OS wouldn't support older x86 applications when running on an ARM processor. Microsoft, in response, called his characterization "factually inaccurate and unfortunately misleading." ...Except, apparently, it wasn't—at least, not as far as ARM/x86 compatibility were concerned. During a Q&A session this past week, Windows division President Steven Sinofsky clarified the relationship between the two architectures: We've been very clear since the very first CES demos and forward that the ARM product won't run any X86 applications... We built a great deal...
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For a CPU that hasn't seen the light of day, there's a great deal of debate surrounding Apple's A6—and the suggestion that it may not appear until later in 2012. The A6 is a complex bit of hardware; rumors indicate that the chip is a quad-core Cortex-A9 CPU built on 28nm at TSMC and utilizing the latter's 3D fabrication technology. We've previously discussed Intel's own 3D tech; TSMC's is presumably based on similar concepts.The CPU's competitive performance is surprisingly unclear. While the Cortex-A9 is a proven design, Apple's A6 will be one of the first 28nm chips on the market. That means it'll serve as a test case for TSMC's introduction of both 28nm gate-last technology and 3D chip...
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Earlier this week, we covered AMD's announcement of its upcoming OpenCL programming conference and how it plans to offer information on making the most of its Llano APU and that processor's capabilities. One of the rumors rumbling around since then has been whether AMD and ARM would pursue any sort of cross-licensing agreement. AMD's director of client products, John Taylor, has since shot down the idea that AMD might build an ARM-based processor, noting: "We've made a big bet on APUs, which are x86." AMD may not be planning an ARM core, but the two companies have been making nice for several months. ARM's vice president of media technologies, Jem Davies, is scheduled to keynote the upcoming...
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