ARM Unveils Next-Gen Processor, Claims 5x Speedup

unts writes "UK chip designer ARM [Note: check out this short history of ARM chips in mobile devices contributed by an anonymous reader] today released the first details of its latest project, codenamed 'Eagle.' It has branded the new design Cortex-A15, which ARM reckons demonstrates the jump in performance from its predecessors, the A8 and A9. ARM's new chip design can scale to 16 cores, clock up to 2.5GHz, and, the company claims, deliver a 5x performance increase over the A8: 'It's like taking a desktop and putting it in your pocket,' said [VP of processor marketing — Eric Schorn], and it was clear that he considers this new design to be a pretty major shot across the bows of Intel and AMD. In case we were in any doubt, he turned the knife further: 'The exciting place for software developer graduates to go and hunt for work is no longer the desktop.'"

Comments

Snoop filtering?

[CarpetShark]

The block diagram:

http://img.hexus.net/v2/channel/news/2010/sep/armeagle3-big.jpg

refers to a "snoop control unit" and "snoop filtering". Is this some kind of DRM?

Re:Snoop filtering?

[CarpetShark]

Answering my own question: I guess it is DRM amongst some processor scheduling/bus control stuff, yeah. There's a reference to "data security using the TrustZone memory model" below:

The Snoop Control Unit (SCU) connects one to four Cortex-A5 processors to the memory system through the AXI interfaces. The SCU maintains data cache coherency between the Cortex-A5 processors and arbitrates L2 requests from the processors and the ACP. The SCU programmers model also includes support for data security using the TrustZone memory model.

-- Cortex-A5 MPCore Technical Reference Manual - 2.1.8.: Snoop Control Unit

Re:Give ARM a chance.

[Alioth]

ARM is incredibly prevalent - more ARM cores are shipped than what Intel and AMD ships combined. Many devices have multiple ARM-based CPUs.

I have a tiny gyro unit for one of my radio control helicopters. Guess what it contains?