ARM looks even more closely at the industrial world
1 min read
The news that ARM has added another member to its highly successful Cortex-M family is not in itself a showstopper. What is of interest is the leap in performance which is likely to be available from microcontrollers built around the Cortex-M7 core.
The figures which ARM has provided use industry benchmarks, so can't be fudged to any great extent. These show that an M7 based MCU manufactured on a 40nm process will have a processing power of 2000CoreMarks when clocked at 400MHz – significantly more than a current 90nm Cortex based part, which offers about 600CoreMarks. It also offers twice the typical DSP performance of the Cortex-M4.
But how the performance is achieved has yet to be explained beyond the fact that the M7 core has a six stage superscalar pipeline, where previous M cores had two or three stages.
One application sector which ARM was keen to highlight is industrial control. Amongst the features of the M7 core is the ability for two devices to run in lockstep and the provision of ECC memory. Also highlighted was safety documentation.
Describing the attributes of the M7 core, ARM's product manager suggested it would be suited to applications which required 'always on, always aware, always connected, user friendly, reliable operation'.
These aren't quite the attributes that will make the M7 a better solution than low end members of the company's Cortex-R series. But the launch of the M7 and the recent announcement of the 64bit v8-R real time architecture suggests that ARM is looking with even more interest at the industrial market.
