Items tagged with Cortex-A15
Ever since NVIDIA unveiled its 64-bit Project Denver CPU at CES last year, there's been discussion over what the core might be and what kind of performance it would offer. Visibly, the chip is huge -- more than 2x the size of the Cortex-A15 that powers the 32-bit version of Tegra K1. Now we know a bit more about the core, and it's like nothing we expected. It is, however, somewhat similar to the designs we've seen in the past from the vanished CPU manufacturer Transmeta. Project Denver, Transmeta, and 64-bit ARM Project Denver's 64-bit flavor. When it designed Project Denver, NVIDIA chose to step away from the out-of-order execution engine that typifies all modern high-end ARM and x86 processors....
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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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For the past few years, ARM has been steadily chipping away at rival PowerVR's domination of the Android and tablet GPU space. While Imagination Technologies dominated the early days of the industry, we've seen a number of competitors emerge since, thanks to aggressive products from Nvidia at the high end and companies like Vivante in the lower-end and midrange spaces. With Mali, ARM is trying to offer a comprehensive solution that can span the entire market, from budget products aimed at Eastern nations to high-end hardware suitable for a next-generation smartphone or tablet. Today, ARM is announcing two new GPU core products -- the Mali-T760 and the Mali-T720. The T760 is the upper-end part,...
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A few weeks ago, the analyst company ABI Research published a report claiming that Intel's new CloverTrail+ platform (dual-core Medfield) for smartphones was significantly faster and more power efficient than anything ARM's various partners were shipping. If you follow the smartphone market, that was a very surprising claim. Medfield was a decent midrange platform when it launched in 2012, but Intel made it clear that it's goal for Medfield was to compete with other platforms in its division -- not seize the performance crown outright. The dual-core / quad-thread CloverTrail+ has improved on Medfield's performance, but it's still based on 2008-era microprocessor technology. Qualcomm, Samsung,...
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big.LITTLE is ARM's solution to a particularly nasty problem: New process nodes no longer deliver the kind of overall power consumption improvements that they did prior to 2005. Prior to 90nm, semiconductor firms could count on new chips being smaller, faster, and drawing less power at a given frequency. Eight years ago, that stopped being true. Tighter process geometries still pack more transistors per square millimeter, but the improvements to power consumption and maximum frequency have been falling every single node. Rising defect densities have already created a situation where -- for the first time ever -- 20nm chips won't be cheaper than the 28nm processors they're supposed to replace....
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In Part I of this series, we discussed ARM's business model and how it works with its various partners as compared to Intel. Today, we're diving into a specific technology that ARM believes will allow it to differentiate its products and offer superior performance to Santa Clara and the upcoming 22nm Bay Trail. big.LITTLE is ARM's solution to a particularly nasty problem: New process nodes no longer deliver the kind of overall power consumption improvements that they did prior to 2005. Prior to 90nm, semiconductor firms could count on new chips being smaller, faster, and drawing less power at a given frequency. Eight years ago, that stopped being true. Tighter process geometries still pack more...
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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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Warren East, the current CEO of ARM Holdings, has announced that he'll step down from the CEO position as of July 1. His replacement, ARM's Simon Segars, is an engineer who worked on some of ARM's earlier processors before stepping up to become company president. East's decision to step down is a bit surprising; the ARM executive told Reuters that "After you've been doing it for 12 years you do get a bit tired... and think "Maybe that's a bit of a brake on the business and somebody else should have a go." East's own "go" was downright impressive. Twelve years ago, the company was one of a number of microcontroller developers. Today, its products power most of the world's smartphones and are poised...
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Samsung is about to raise the stakes in the smartphone wars as it gets ready to detail the first mobile applications processor built around ARM's big.LITTLE architecture. Big.LITTLE is essentially an expansion of the "4-Plus-1" core technology used in NVIDIA's ARM-based Tegra 3 SoC, which is designed to deliver quad-core performance when needed and battery-saving single-core performance the rest of the time. According to EETimes, Samsung plans to talk about an upcoming 8-core chip at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February. Clearly based on ARM's big.LITTLE concept, Samsung's chip will be a 28nm SoC with a pair of quad-core clusters. One of those clusters is clocked at 1.8GHz,...
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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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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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ARM made good on its announced intention to introduce server products today through a partnership with Calxeda (formerly Smooth-Stone). The CPU developer has been planning to introduce server products for quite some time. ARM, in this case, isn't alone--Intel is planning to launch Atom-flavored Xeon processors, while AMD is evaluating the idea of Brazos-powered Opteron products. Today, Calxeda announced its Trailblazer platform and the ten companies that've signed on as part of that initiative. These include Autonomic Resources, Canonical, Caringo, Couchbase, Datastax, Eucalyptus Systems, Gluster, Momentum SI, Opscode, and Pervasive. Canonical--best known for developing Ubuntu in its mobile,...
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One of the big announcements at CES this year will be from Microsoft; the company plans to announce (and possibly demonstrate) a consumer-centric version of Windows running on ARM processors. The company's decision is a powerful endorsement. Other Microsoft products like Windows Embedded and Windows Mobile support ARM products but the software giant has never released a non-x86 mainstream version of Windows.* It'll be quite awhile before we see an actual shipping OS. Microsoft has already sunk months of work into the endeavor, but vendor driver support is expected to take quite some time. There's also the question of software support—one reason the non-x86 versions of Windows NT ultimately...
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Earlier this week, we detailed GlobalFoundries roadmap for the next few years and touched on the company's rapidly growing list of partners. A new announcement from ARM today sheds fresh detail on where the semiconductor industry is headed in the next few years. Say hello to the next-generation ARM core, the ARM Cortex-A15. Unlike the ARM-A5 architecture, whose launch we covered nearly a year ago, ARM-15 is aimed squarely at high-end markets. The degree of overlap suggests that A15 may nudge A8 out of the lineup altogether. The A15 is based on the same ARM v7-A Cortex architecture as the A9, but adds support for LPAE (Long Physical Address Extensions) and is designed to maintain cache coherency...
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