ARM Community: ARM Cortex-R Processors - Feeding our Insatiable Demand for Content - ARM Community

It’s actually quite difficult to just categorise this blog entry under the Smart Mobile Devices name because I want to talk about the recently announced Cortex™-R5 and Cortex-R7 real time products, but these products are not limited to Smart Mobile Devices, and to be honest, over the next few years, these may well be everywhere, ‘under-the-hood’ of many things that you take for granted but probably didn’t even know were ARM Powered®.

Let me explain a little more - you probably don’t realise it but there is a good chance that you’ve already used ARM® Cortex-R technology hundreds of times today, from accessing the data on your hard drive, downloading emails on your smartphone right through to safely making your journey to work this morning. All of this is because ARM Cortex-R4 processors are shipping in volume in a broad range of market segments including hard disk drive controllers, industrial control, wireless baseband processors, consumer products and electronic control units for automotive systems.

So why do we need these new processors when Cortex-R4 is already there? Well, it comes down to you and me as consumers taking advantage of this ‘everything connected’ world that we live in – now close your eyes and imagine this technology and desire for connectivity taking giant leaps forward, with your Smart Mobile Device as the portal that you use to access all of this information.

It’s more than likely that your smartphone is already using a Cortex-A processor, maybe combined with a Mali™ GPU, to enable you to dial phone numbers, watch streaming videos or update your Facebook status but underpinning all of this activity, connecting your smartphone to the outside world is the mobile baseband subsystem. It’s this subsystem that could be made up of one or two Cortex-R processors, that actually feeds the smartphone applications processor with its raw information that can be made into videos and makes the telephone calls through the network. Imagine your phone in the future needing to access so much more information as it becomes your main portal. Now imagine all the people around you also trying to access much more information and you’re now envisioning the world evolving from the 3G networks that exist today, and that is where the Cortex-R5 and Cortex-R7 come in – they are future proofing our connection to the ‘internet of things’ and as the networks get faster your smartphone is right up there with it.

Andy Frame, CPU Product Manager, ARM, is based in Cambridge and is fanatical about the success of the Cortex-M3 and how it is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard for 32-bit MCU’s. Since joining ARM in 1995, Andy has had a variety of roles from Software Tools Technical Training though to Business Development, joining the CPU product management team about two years ago to look after Cortex-M3.