ARM Outs New Cortex CPUs Targeting Mass Storage, Automotive Segments

As you've been able to see over the past year or so, ARM's expertise in the field of low-power CPUs dedicated to mobile and embedded platforms has managed to push the company towards the first positions in the chip manufacturers' market, a trend they intend to continue with the launch of the new ARM Cortex-R5 MPCore and the Cortex-R7 MPCore processors.

The new processors have been designed for use in the 3G and 4G mobile baseband, mass storage, automotive and industrial markets, and can be implemented as either single or dual cores, delivering a complete and comprehensive set of features that makes their quite well-suited for the aforementioned specific applications.

According to ARM, the Cortex-R5 processor extends the feature set of the Cortex-R4 processor to enable higher levels of system performance, such as a Low-Latency Peripheral Port (LLPP) for fast peripheral reads and writes, and an Accelerator Coherency Port (ACP) providing cache coherency for increased data transfer efficiency.

The Cortex-R7 processor, on the other hand, sports a new technology, including out-of-order execution, dynamic register renaming combined with improved branch prediction, superscalar execution and faster hardware support for divide, floating point and other functions.

“The simultaneous launch of the Cortex-R5 and Cortex-R7 MPCore processors clearly delineates our leadership position as the architecture of choice for current and future mobile baseband and advanced storage applications, as well as building on our unparalleled position in the wider embedded market,” said Eric Schorn, vice president of processor marketing, ARM.

“These two advanced processors bring together more than 20 years of ARM expertise in low-power design with a host of new high-performance and real-time technologies which enables our Partners to future-proof their designs based on a single consistent architecture,” concluded Mr. Schorn.

Interested parties can license both processors as we speak, and the companies expects quite a high level of interest for its new Cortex CPUs in the near future.