ARM expands Cortex range

John Goodacre, ARM’s multiprocessor programme manager, said the announcement was part of a move by the company to open up new markets. “A range of markets need increased power efficiency with higher performance,” he claimed, “along with the need to share software across multiple platforms.” The Cortex-A9 MPCore is aimed at high performance handsets, networks and automotive infotainment. The Cortex-A9 single core, by contrast, is targeted at the mass market, where, said Goodacre, ‘people can take it, plug it in and make things go better than before’. “The A9 single core,” he added, “will bring ARM11 type users more performance for less power.” The MPCore can be configured with up to four cores and Goodacre says a lot of effort has been put into making those cores work efficiently. One particular feature is the Snoop Control Unit, which moves data between the various caches and works out how to distribute the interrupts. Designers will also have access to a floating point unit and to the NEON Media Processing Engine. The A9 processor was developed largely by a team of 30 designers in Sophia Antipolis, adds Louise Joselyn. “We started on multiprocesspr r&d four years ago using the ARM9,” said Pascal Perou, design centre head. “It was an obvious next step for our group to develop this new generation core.” The design process involved a lot of cross team collaboration to ensure peripherals cores, such as NEON, can be integrated successfully.