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ARM Developer Confab Delivers


New chips, tools and plans on the menu

By P. J. Connolly
November 1, 2007 — 
New analysis tools, cores and partnerships took the stage at the fourth annual ARM Developers' Conference in Santa Clara last month.

First, the company announced the launch of RealView Profiler, a tool designed for nonintrusive performance analysis and real workload coverage. ARM claims that it can reduce ROM requirements by 20 percent, and improve performance by the same amount. RealView Profiler provides information on code efficiency, CPU interlocks and unexpected instruction delays, with low-level views mapped to the source code and annotated with performance data.

RealView Profiler is an Eclipse plug-in, and supports both hardware profiling with the RealView Trace 2 data capture unit, and virtual profiling with RealView’s Real-Time System Models.

The first release of the tool will work with the company’s Cortex-R4 processors, as well as the ARM926EJ-S, the 1136JF-S and the 1176JZF-S; support for others is expected within months.

ARM also announced the availability for licensing of its latest Cortex-A9 processors in single-and multicore versions. The A9s are compatible with the rest of the Cortex family, and use a dynamic length, 8-stage superscalar, multi-issue pipeline with speculative out-of-order execution; ARM claims the new processors can crank through four instructions per cycle at a clock rate in excess of 1GHz.

ARM RealView developer tools support both processors, although cycle-based and programmer’s view models for use with RealView will not be available until spring 2008.

According to the company, the Cortex-A9 MPCore processor supports system-level coherence with accelerators and DMA, further increasing performance and reducing power consumption of the multicore processor. It is the first ARM processor to combine the Cortex architecture with multiprocessing capabilities.

ARM is positioning the single-core version of the A9 for feature phones and other low-cost embedded devices, at a cost and power budget similar to that of the ARM11 family.

ARM also revealed that it will partner with six companies to develop a standards-based platform built on Linux, Gnome Mobile and Mozilla Firefox, to run on ARM architecture SoCs (systems on-chip). The partners include Marvell, MontaVista, Mozilla, Movial Creative Technologies, Samsung and Texas Instruments, and reference boards were demonstrated at the conference.

The Linux Mobile Computing Platform will be released as open source, and other projects are expected to get under way after the basic infrastructure is nailed down. ARM and its partners in the Linux Mobile Computing Platform expect to release the full-blown platform early in 2008, with devices coming to market about a year later.

“By stepping up the collaboration among key stakeholders in the mobile market,” noted ARM sales and marketing executive vice president Mike Inglis in a prepared statement, “we will be able to jointly deliver the devices and applications with the cutting-edge innovation consumers have come to expect.”


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