Date: 23rd Sept 2010

Eagle processor; ARM's eye on the future computing devices

As the computing spreads from desktops to mobile phones and such smart digital information assistants including tablet computers, the processor inside these devices are heading for significant changes. The new processors not only are mere data crunchers but also handle the streaming high definition digital media fed at high-speed from different system/locations. Also the power consumption pattern changes dynamically in these chips based on the usage. Like a chameleon these devices get configured for different processing roles; single core or multi-core, 32-bit or 64-bit, controller to DSP, etc.

ARM is with its small (footprint) and smart processor design approach has enough IP to design even smarter but still smaller semiconductor processor chips compared to other in the market.
Here is one such smart processor IP core called Cortex-A15 MPCore also called Eagle processor.

ARM says this IP delivers a 5x performance improvement over today's advanced smartphone processors, within a comparable energy footprint. This is way of meeting the requirement of putting so many features into one handheld device. ARM characterizes this device as elastic performer.
Few named applications include: Smartphone and Mobile Computing, Digital Home Entertainment, Servers, Wireless communication Infrastructure.

The eye-catching features of this processor core:

OS virtualization: Getting ready for cloud
Soft-error recovery: System crash support
Larger memory addressability: Speed and performance issue when reading and writing into other chips and devices
System coherency: Interoperability and interface issues

ARM is also supporting semiconductor chip companies with AMBA 4 compliant CoreLink system IP, CoreSight debug and trace IP, Mali Graphics, and a host development tools to ensure all the pieces of SoC design are easily and quickly available.

Soon Intel's Atom or any other Intel's new product with some other interesting name will meet this ARM's Eagle in the market of convergence devices (combination of computing, communication and entertaining) to give a confusing choice for the electronic engineering OEMs.

It's totally a new market and new approach for the emerging market of mobile-cloud: an intricate combination of mobile computing and cloud computing.