A call to ARMs
1 min read
If laptops, smart phones, set top boxes and even games consoles do not provide enough ways to access the internet at home, don’t worry. New consumer electronics products are coming that promise elegant ways to browse the web.
The mobile internet device – a compact, slimmed down notebook aimed at web browsing, rather than running traditional pc applications – is one. The device has a larger screen and keyboard than a smart phone and strips out costly laptop features such as multicore cpus and a hard disk.
The other internet enabled device emerging in living rooms is the digital picture frame. The touchscreen display shows images and video from the internet or from a plugged in memory card and can allow a user to send images by e-mail or to upload them to social networking sites such as Flickr and Facebook. Such devices retail for $100.
Chipmakers have been quick to respond to such emerging consumer electronics opportunities.
January saw Marvell announce the PXA168, for digital photo frames and devices such as portable GPS navigation systems and internet media players, while Freescale detailed the i.MX51 family for mobile internet devices.
Both use ARM cores that, for the first time, can be clocked at gigahertz rates and include multimedia processing engines and a mix of hardware peripherals designed to reduce system costs.
The most obvious difference between the two is the choice of ARM core. The PXA168 is Marvell’s first PXA device to use the internally developed Sheeva core; Marvell gained an ARM architectural license when it acquired Intel’s XScale business in 2006. Sheeva is already used as part of Marvell’s SoC designs in some 600million consumer devices a year.
In contrast, Freescale’s i.MX51 uses the licensed ARM Cortex-A8, a superscalar cpu core that can issue two instructions per clock cycle.
“The PXA168 is our first application processor designed specifically for the consumer market,” said Allen Leibovitch, senior marketing manager for Marvell’s application processor group.
The design goal of the PXA168 was to produce a device with gigahertz processing performance, coupled with a comprehensive software suite including operating systems such as Linux, Windows Mobile and Windows CE. “Chipsets today are fixed function with a limited processing performance and built on a hand crafted real time operating system,” said Leibovitch.
