Intel's StrongArm Roadmap

Midvale writes "PC Week article about the plans Intel has for the next set of StrongArm chips, .18 micron process, up to 600mHz. These things would be great CPU's for wearable computers." Its nice to see that this isn't gonna die out.

Comments

StrongARM is an interesting little chip

[aheitner]

It's got some unusual properties -- relatively high tolerance for hard radiation for one. I read the following use in an AMSAT journal a few months back.

It turns out AMSAT (the lunatics who build themselves satellites out of parts they find at KMART :) has been using the same ancient 8bit microcontroller on their satellites for some time now, as most ucontrollers are not suitable to the radiation levels in space. But these days .5 MIPS just doesn't cut it, so they went around looking for a better chip -- and found StrongARM. Their next satellite will have a 133MHz ARM, plenty of CPU power to go around.

I wonder if they'll run Linux :)

Re:StrongARM is an interesting little chip

[SpinyNorman]

The ARM is one of the few true RISC designs around, with all 32 bit instructions, and all instructions conditional. This is the reason for the tiny die size and low poer requirements. I used to work for Acorn Computers (the "A" in ARM) in the early 80's, and knew the main designer of the ARM - Steve Furber. As of a couple of years ago he was working at the University of Manchester (UK), where he had fabricated a fully asynchronous ARM CPU that he had been working on for years. This is basically a dataflow design, and (potentially) saves huge amounts of power by removing the need to clock the whole chip. The ARM was partly inspired by the 6502 which was what the early Acorn computers were based on, and was minimal enough to practically be a RISC design itself. Ah, the good old days...