ARM Holdings, whose low-power chip designs dominate the booming
smartphone and tablet markets, is unveiling its most energy-efficient
chip yet, as well as a new processing model for its future
system-on-a-chip designs.
ARM on Oct. 19 announced the Cortex-A7 MPCore chip
during an event in San Francisco, where officials called it the most
energy-efficient application-class chip the company has ever developed.
The Cortex-A7 offers five times the energy efficiency of the current
Cortex-A8—which is widely used in mainstream smartphones—and is a fifth
of the size of its larger brethren, according to ARM officials.
At the same time, it offers greater performance
than the Cortex-A8, which officials said will bring a better overall
user experience to low-end, entry-level smartphones that come in below
$100. The 28-nanometer chip will start appearing in sub-$100
smartphones in 2013, and will offer the same level of performance
that’s found in current $500 high-end devices, according to officials.
ARM doesn’t make processors, but instead designs
them and then licenses those designs to chip makers such as Qualcomm,
Texas Instruments, Freescale Semiconductor, LG Electronics and
Broadcom.
The Cortex-A7 announcement comes a day after ARM
and manufacturing partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC)
had taped out the first 20-nanometer multicore Cortex-A15 chip,
which the company first introduced a year ago. ARM officials have said
they expect the Cortex-A15 to enable their designs to not only continue
to dominate the market for smartphones and tablets, but also move up
the ladder into PCs and low-power servers in the data center.
The Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 also will be the key
players in ARM’s new big.Little architecture for higher-end devices.
According to ARM officials, the big.Little design is a way of
addressing users’ seemingly conflicting demands for greater performance
and longer battery life with lower power consumption.
The idea behind the architecture is to have both a
Cortex-A7 and a Cortex-A15 reside on the same SoC. The lower-power
Cortex-A7 would be used for basic tasks like social media, audio
playback and calling, and for running the operating system. The
Cortex-A15 would be used for the more compute intense workloads, such
as navigation and gaming. Power management software would select the
right processor for the right jobs in a fashion that would be
transparent to the user.
ARM officials put the migration from one chip to
another at 20 microseconds. ARM technology, such as AMBA 4 ACE
Coherency Extensions, enables the switching of workloads between two
processors and ensures full cache, I/O and chip-to-chip coherency
between the two processors and across the system.
The result is highly optimized processing for each workload and increased energy savings.
“As smartphones and tablets continue to evolve
into users’ primary compute device, consumers are demanding performance
as well as the always-on, always-connected service they expect,” Mike
Inglis, executive vice president of ARM’s Processor Division, said in a
statement. “The challenge for our industry and the ARM ecosystem is how
to deliver on this. The introduction of Cortex-A7 and big.LITTLE
addresses this challenge and extends ARM’s technology leadership by
setting a new standard for energy-efficient processors and redefining
the traditional power and performance relationship.”
Freescale officials said Oct. 19 that they have
licensed the Cortex-A7 chip design, and had previously licensed the
Cortex-A15. The designs will be used for Freescale’s i.MX applications
processors for such industries as embedded, automotive infotainment and
smart mobile devices.
“As the market advances, there is an increasing
need for low-power, higher-performance processing to deliver optimal
user experiences across a broad range of markets," Bernd Lienhard, vice
president and general manager of Freescale's Multimedia Applications
Division, said in a statement. "ARM Cortex-A7 technology, coupled with
big.Little processing and Freescale’s multicore expertise, will enable
us to innovate and deliver exciting new products to our customers."
ARM is moving toward a full competitive scenario
with chip giant Intel, which is looking to become a larger player in
the mobile device arena. At the same time, ARM officials have been
vocal about moving into such areas as PCs and low-power servers, which
currently are dominated by Intel products.
The competition promises to ramp up next year, when not only will both companies be rolling out new products, but also Microsoft will release Windows 8, which will support both x86 and ARM architectures.
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