If you love superlatives, you'll love
ARM's new Cortex-M0. Hailed as the smallest, lowest power and most energy-efficient ARM processor available, this chip reportedly enables MCU developers to "achieve 32-bit performance at an 8-bit price point." The company asserts that this processor can consume as little as 85 microwatts/MHz (0.085 milliwatts) in an area of under 12K gates when using the ARM 180ULL cell library, and while that's probably over most of your heads, let's just say that this thing is ripe for use in medical devices, e-metering, lighting, smart control, gaming accessories and the like. Those looking to get this into their next widget should be thrilled to know that it's available today for licensing, though you'll have to phone up someone in the know to talk dollars and cents.
posted Feb 23rd 2009 3:51PM
So i can have one of these running of my brainwaves?
Me too!!
What would you possibly do with a 50 MHz processor?
Plenty of things use
Plenty of things use less than 50 MHz processors. Most microcontrollers used by hobbyists for robotics and such run between 4 and 20 MHz, for example. They have less than 1K RAM and a few KB flash. You can run a web server on them.
(sorry, engadget doesn't like less than signs)
Yeah, this seems to be ARM's solution for taking aim at the PIC/Amtel AVR market...
Back in the good ole days we could run windows on a 50Mhz CPU
Why the Super NES had a 3.58mhz CPU, which was not even as capable as an ARM. Just look at what it could do.
And the speed (Mhz) is.....?
According to the ARM web site, 50 MHz.
If you search around on site, it says 50 MHz
If you scrabble in the leaves, it says 50mhz
Cue the dumb questions about use in cell phones as the CPU...
Now how does this help my Adjustable Rate Mortgage? What?... Oh... Computers, you say... Never mind.
So...does this bend Moore's Law or follow it?
The cycle of a lot of things in tech is to add features, add features, add features, then start over and rewrite everything, then re-add all the features and start adding the ones you couldn't with the previous architecture...
I can't wait for the 'rewrite' cycle of the x86 instruction set mess. (but they're still adding cool features like AES acceleration and better xml processing stuff and power management..)
Meh, meeting PIC in the middle... What's the point? 50K gates?
I'm a software guy not a hardware guy, but I work with a bunch of hardware nerds and we make a product that uses an Atmel something-or-other (it's a harvard architecture based chip, that's all I know).
Strangely enough we were at lunch today and one of those guys was bitching about the memory scheme and how they had to jump through a few hoops to get gcc to interact properly with data that belonged in Flash vs. Program memory. He was wishing for an ARM alternative. I mean, we've solved any issues with the Atmel a while back, but it was one of those niggling little oddities that he was hoping would just go away one of these days.
This doesn't seem like any kind of improvement over an ARM 7.
The point isn't to be a performance improvement over an ARM7 (that's the goal of the Cortex-M3,) the point is to be lower power and cheaper - to compete with PICs and AVRs and such.
I have no idea how these compare clock to clock, but... (all figures for a 0.18µm process)
Cortex-M0: 4.25 mW @ 50 MHz
Cortex-M3: 12.5 mW @ 50 MHz
ARM7TDMI: Under 10.5 mW @ 50 MHz (figures are for a "speed-optimized" 115MHz ARM7TDMI core, so a power-optimized core will be more efficient)
I believe the target market for this chip is the same as TI's MSP430 (ultra low power 16bit mcu) and at the millions of designs that still use 8051's. The M0 is similar in die size (which means similar in cost for the most part), but will offer 32bit performance and a clear upgrade path into the M3's if need be.
This should also be a good multi processor solution with the old ARM11's and new A8's for your cell phones. Shut down the main cpu and run off this guy when the horse power isn't needed. The gate count is low enough for this to all happen on one chip... We will see if something like that ever happens though.
"Hailed as the smallest, lowest power and most energy-efficient ARM processor available, this chip" -- ARM doesn't make chips. They design cores, which their licensees include in their chips.