ARM Community: SoC Design - ARM Community

I hate reading manuals. Maybe it’s a guy thing or maybe it’s the engineer in me, but it’s pretty rare that I’ll bring home a shiny new device and then sit down and read the manual. Give me a few pictures or examples on how something should be used and I’m good to go. Not surprisingly, a lot of customers take this same approach with our software products. Immediately after installation they’ll start things up and look around for an examples directory long before they’ll ever click on the “Help” button.

This approach works well for a lot of tasks but when it comes to more complex tasks that example needs to be very sophisticated to be of value. System on chip (SoC) performance analysis, certainly meets that “complex task” threshold. The best way to analyze the performance of an SoC before it is built is by using a virtual prototype. Before any performance analysis work can be performed however, there is a long list of tasks to be performed. Models need to be assembled and configured for all of the important design elements, or even written if the models don’t already exist. These models need to be pulled together into a system configuration which matches the end design. Finally, software must be written to initialize all of the components in the system and then generate some meaningful traffic. Hopefully your virtual prototyping tool has some good data visualization tools. If not, you can add data extract...

Just last week while at a friend’s home, I noticed an interesting device from the past – an Apple Newton, circa mid-1990s – a device way ahead of its time. An early personal digital assistant (PDA) based on the 32-bit ARM 610 processor on 1.2um CMOS process, running at 20-33Mhz with battery life of over 30 hours of continuous use. There’s still quite a following on this extraordinary device that even featured handwriting recognition.

Fast forward to present day. Now, we have the latest smartphones – mobile computing platforms featuring a PDA, camera, GPS, WiFi, web browser, touchscreen and of course, cell phone. The typical advanced smartphone is based on the ARM® CortexTM-A9 processor core on 45nm to 28nm process technologies, running at or greater than 1GHz with limited battery life of approximately 10 hours max.

Whoa …..so what happened to the battery life?? Granted there are phenomenally greater features and performance, at the cost of power, i.e. 40x in performance from the Newton but one-third ...

It is entirely appropriate that ARM will announce technical details of its latest hard macro product, the Cortex™-A15 MP4 Hard Macro for TSMC 28HPM node at COOL Chips XV, the IEEE Symposium on Low-Power and High-Speed Chips, being held this week in Yokohama, Japan (18-20th April, 2012). This exciting new hard macro not only perfectly encapsulates the theme of the symposium, but also pulls together the contemporary and divergent design challenges of offering extremely high-performance compute engines within a conservative power budget.

The Cortex-A15 MP4 Hard Macro is a high performance, power-optimized quad-core hard macro implementation of our flagship Cortex-A15 processor, on leading 28nm process. It delivers three significant firsts for the ARM hard macro portfolio, as not only is this the first quad–core hard macro, but also the first hard macro based on the highest performance ARMv7 architecture-based Cortex-A15 processor, and it is also the first hard macro based on 28nm process.

In terms of configuration, the Cortex-A15 MP...

今天，ARM Cortex-A7 的隆重推出…标志着 big.Little 处理架构的最终实现！

我驾驶着一辆节能型的本田飞度行驶在 20 英里的市区上班途中。有时我会突发奇想，希望在自己的座驾上安装一个更快的引擎，但大部分时间我还是对自己驾驶的节能车辆感到很满意。但我必须承认我曾抗拒换一辆经济型轿车；我时常梦想自己拥有像保时捷或宝马车那样的性能，但只希望在驾车的小部分时间里拥有这种卓越的性能。如果我能驾驶一辆平均能效保持在四缸引擎范围内，而在需要最高性能的片刻可迅速切换到高性能的涡轮增压式 V8 引擎汽车，那该有多好啊？如果平均燃油能效接近于 4 缸引擎，而最高性能接近于涡轮增压式 V8 引擎的性能，会怎样？
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ARM Cortex-A7 processor…It's all about right-sized equipment.
In Part 1 of this blog we saw how right-sizing of air conditioning is vitally important because it performs three different functions simultaneously: Cooling, dehumidification and ventilation. Increases in efficiency could be obtained by separating out these three functions and optimizing them independently. As we saw last time, pumping air through ducts is inefficient due to the wasted pumping energy. You could use a hydronic system like a traditional underfloor heating system as is common in northern Europe, but with cooling in the ceiling as well as heating in the floor. Pumping water is a more efficient way to move energy than air. Even though the water pipe is physically smaller than an air duct, in terms of thermal energy transfer capacity it's a fatter pipe. But this wouldn't dehumidify or ventilate, so you'd still need a very small A/C system with air ducts to provide these functions. Duct size and pumping losses would be much lower than a pure ducted central air system though...

Today the ARM Cortex-A7 processor was announced…the power of big.Little processing is finally realized!

I drive a Honda Fit, mainly for the fuel efficiency, on a 20 mile city street commute. Sometimes I wish my car had a faster engine, but most of the time I’m happy to drive for high gas mileage. But I have to say I was a reluctant convert to economy cars; I often find myself longing for the performance of a Porsche or BMW, but I only really want that performance a small percentage of the time I’m driving. Wouldn’t it be great if it were possible to drive a car with the average efficiency of a 4-cylinder engine, a car that could switch to a high performance of a turbocharged V8 engine for the small percentage of time you actually wanted peak performance? What if the average fuel economy was closer to the 4-cylinder and the peak performance was closer to that of the turbo V8?

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ARM IP and ARM processor usage is pervasive across multiple segments of the electronics industry. As shown in Figure 1, each of these market segments have unique design challenges and analysis drivers. For example, a SoC targeting a mobile handset or tablet will require high-performance, while still meeting the overall power budget. Memory and I/O IP on the other hand, must be designed for immunity to noise that is coupled via the power grid routing, the package, or the substrate. SoCs targeting automotive or medical industries must meet high reliability standards and minimize their electromagnetic interface (EMI) signature.


Using a power and noise budgeting methodology...

A couple months ago IBM celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding on June 16, 1911. The most advanced computational technology in 1911 was mechanical tabulation machines and punched card data processing equipment. That’s right; a few of you remember these infernal beasts. My first encounter with punched cards and IBM’s JCL (job control language) was in graduate school while trying to get my simulation of the Motorola 68000 CISC processor to execute on the IBM mainframe. As I reflect on that late night frustration I am reminded of two key outcomes of the experience. First, the classmate that helped me through the accounting procedures on IBM mainframe became a lifelong friend. Secondly, I began to appreciate the simplicity of RISC processors and their potential for efficient computation but that is for a later story.

IBM continued under the leadership of Thomas J. Watson, Sr., who adopted the slogan, “THINK,” as his vision of the company culture. This culture of explorat...

In part 1 of this blog, I outlined the thought process behind the Elba program. Here I’ll look at the implementation decisions for the project.

In ARM there are various stages of maturity of a new processor development, reaching silicon implementation in various fabrication processes is one of those and it made sense to us that Elba must also be a full silicon implementation. In fact, just in case this does work, and what we think may happen does, we’ll implement the Cortex-A9 processor in a way such that ARM could commercialize and promote these “G” implementations as a new product. But what type of silicon? In ARM we often build silicon devices, but these typically are no more functional as a device than something that can execute a little code from on-chip memories. Great, so our goal to build a multi-GHz Cortex-A9 will be able to run Dhrystone – we need more than that . . . How much more? As it ended up, quite a bit more. ARM also develops the Mali 3D graphic processors, so the device should include the...