ARM Announces Next Gen Processor Designs

ARM Holdings has launched the ARM11 microarchitecture, which targets a performance range of 400 to 1,200 MIPS, while meeting the low power needs and cost requirements of battery-powered devices. It forms the basis of a new range of ARM11 CPU products.

ARM Holdings does not make processors; instead it licences its designs to other companies, like Intel and TI, who make the actual chips. Processors based on ARM designs are at the heart of most handhelds, including those that will run Palm OS 5.

"The ARM11 microarchitecture is the foundation of our next generation of CPU cores, and delivers new levels of performance and efficiency for leading-edge wireless and consumer devices," said John Rayfield, director of R&D at ARM Holdings.

The new microarchitecture was designed for next-generation wireless and consumer devices where high levels of system performance and low power consumption are required. These include handhelds and 2.5G and 3G mobile phone handsets.

The ARM11 microarchitecture will deliver 350 to 500+ MHz worst-case on 0.13u foundry processes, and over 1 GHz on next-generation 0.1u processes.

Multimedia performance is accelerated through the enhanced integer pipeline, new SIMD media instructions, high-performance 64-bit memory system, and hardware support for unaligned data access. Real-time performance is enhanced by using vectored interrupts, and low-interrupt-latency operating modes which, together with ARMv6 architecture enhancements, reduce interrupt handling overhead by 70%.

The new ARM11 microarchitecture also provides considerably improved operating system performance by use of physically addressed caches, and new ARMv6 architecture instructions that accelerate context switching. TIt was developed in close consultation with leading operating system vendors.

The first CPU using the new microarchitecture will be available the fourth quarter of this year.

Related Information:

• ARM Announces Next Generation ARM11 Microarchitecture