ARM Articles

Currently the Samsung Galaxy S3 has set the new standard for mobile graphics. Encased in it’s body is a quad-core Mali 400 GPU which has been blowing all of the competition out of the water. The benchmarks scores it’s been putting out for mobile is mind blowing in how amazing it really is. So what could the future be? An updated quad core? ARM laughed at that idea and with the Samsung S3 barely out for a month has announced a processor that will blow the current flagship of phones away. ARM has announced a new GPU that is an eight core. Yes they’ve announced a new processor with twice the cores of that which is their current flagship product.

The leader in the processor industry, ARM, has been producing a wide array of microprocessors since 1990. Today, they have made it public that they will be releasing the ARM® Cortex™-M0+ processor, which happens to be the most efficient processor in the world regarding energy.

What makes the Cortex™-M0+ so effective is the fact that it has been completely enhanced to work with low levels of power, and also consume low-cost MCUs as well as the use of smart control systems. Being the latest item added to the collection, the Cortex makes use of about 33% of what a regular 16-bit processor puts to use when functioning. On top of that, it has the capability of raising the bar for the performance level, which is also better than that of a regular 16-bit or 8-bit processor.

With the Cortex™-M0+ now available, consumers will have the opportunity to upgrade to 32-bit devices, since they will be able to improve the overall performance of their devices without having to give up power or any other feature.

ARM is strong-arming the server market with the smallest server. Calxeda released the EnergyCore ARM server-on-chip, or SoC, eating up a mere 1.5 watts. When idling, the SoC only requires 0.5 watts. HP is committing itself to manufacturing servers based on the technology. This is great news for Calxeda, since HP is the world’s largest manufacturer of servers. The SoC creams its closest competitor, Intel, who makes a 20-watt x86 server chip.

Calexda is counting on the successes of ARM in mobile devices to somehow magically apply to their attempts to challenge Intel in the commodity server market. They boast that their chip is ideal for scalable analytics, web serving, mid-tier infrastructure (in-memory databases and caching), big-data apps, and media streaming.

Calexda appears to be going after the leftovers in the server market, though, due to the 32-bit address of their chip. It is based on the ARM Cortex processor, but Intel will challenge them on exactly this point about addressing. Still, the form factor is small and the energy consumption puts Intel to shame. There is definitely a niche for this midget 32-bit chip.