ARM launches real time focused version of its v8 architecture

The architecture is said to build on the successful development of v7-R based devices, such as the Cortex-R4, R5 and R7. Richard York, ARM's director of embedded processor products, said: "A couple of years ago, we saw a trend emerging, where system designers and integrators were struggling to manage complexity. They were pulling in sofware from all over the place, dealing with different levels of safety and having a big problem pulling it all into an microcontroller. "That flagged up to us that we should try to take the virtualisation and MMU features of our applications processors and fit them into a real time deterministic architecture." According to York, the v8-R architecture will enable the development of processors offering increased performance and efficiency, but which can manage complexity and sophistication. "Users are trying to match more software with a range of safety levels; they want to run Linux for interfaces and a real time OS for control. V8-R solves these challenges by taking the 'good stuff' from v8-A and moulding it to make it real time and safety friendly." However, the announcement of v8-R is just that; no products are available yet. "It will be like the announcement of the v8-A architecture," York explained. "The first v8-A products appeared a year later and this will be the same. About this time next year, we'll be saying 'here's the first processor which implements v8-R. We're building it at the moment and it's being driven by an automotive customer." While v8-A devices can embrace 64bit processing, the initial v8-R part will be a 32bit device. "The market isn't ready for 64bit," said York, "and nobody is pushing for it. However, we can see it coming; we can see the performance benefits and applications will need to address more than 4Gbyte of memory at some point. But not at the moment. In two or three years, we may be saying 'let's do 64bit'," he concluded.