Processing performance upgraded in latest Sitara family

Elizabete de Freitas, product marketing manager, said: "This is the successor to the AM335x range, which has already found its way into a large number of industrial applications. It's not a revolution, but the new family is touching areas where enhancements were needed, including computing performance and interfaces. The AM437x range is targeted at the same applications as the 335x family, but in some cases, it will be used at one level higher in terms of performance or integration." The Cortex-A9 CPU in the new devices runs at up to 1GHz, compared to the 800MHz maximum in the 335x range. According to de Freitas, this could bring a 40% increase in performance in some applications. The AM437x processors also support real time processing via quad core programmable real time units (PRU). These offload real time processing tasks from the ARM host, managing deterministic tasks such as controlling motors. The company adds the PRUs are robust enough to enable complex functions like multiple industrial fieldbus protocols. "Where the 335x range had two PRUs," de Freitas said, "the 437x range has four and this makes it possible to support protocols in parallel." Other features include two independent 8channel A/D converters running at up to 867ksample/s for servo motor control, audio sampling and sensor monitoring, as well as an improved vector floating point unit for motor control and audio algorithms. Power consumption for the new family is said to be less than 1W in all applications.