ARM Community: SoC Design - ARM Community

ARM is heading to Multicore World 2012 to discuss ARM MPCore solutions and grow the development ecosystem in New Zealand.

If you were to ask most people what New Zealand is famous for, you’d probably hear it has more sheep than people, suggesting that the most that small country down-under can offer is open spaces and woolly clothing – how wrong.

Later this month, the balance will be put a little out of shape, starting on the 27th March for two days a number of international speakers and researchers and I will be taking time to specifically travel to New Zealand to address and participate within their growing community of businesses and technology innovators addressing the international challenge of multicore at Multicore World 2012.

ARM today has very little of its development ecosystem located in the southern hemisphere, however this opportunity to inform the community about the ARM MPCore solutions and vision was too good to be missed. As such, I will be travelling fr...

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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Last week ARM participated in the GLOBALFOUNDRIES 2011 Global Technology Conference (GTC11), ARM was involved in two notable panel sessions that covered a range of important industry issues. I wanted to share with you a few highlights of those discussions.

The first is the annual CEO panel, something that is becoming a GTC tradition. This one was entitled “Design Enablement Challenges and Future Solutions”. At this event, right after lunch, CEO’s, get together to talk about industry trends. ARM participated in the panel last year as well, with Simon Segars (EVP/GM of ARM’s Physical IP Division) representing ARM along with nearly the same other panelists. Also like last year, the panel was moderated by Mojy Chian from GLOBALFOUNDRIES, their Senior VP of Design Enablement. The panelists were:
Warren East, CEO, ARM...

In the previous three blogs (Parts 1, 2 and 3) I’ve outlined the background and key decisions involved in the development and implementation of the Elba testchip. Now we’ll look at the final steps taken to bring Elba to life.

As our understanding of the various components broadened, the actual SoC architecture design activity then knew the details it needed in order finalize the design. We knew we had two Cortex-A9 macros, a Mali GPU and the various other components, but not too much about how we would best plug them together. Since we also wanted to investigate system level power management, many of the large system components were also placed into their own independent power domains. The layout of the design also became rather ...

The 48th DAC was held in San Diego this year and whenever DAC is not in Silicon Valley there is always a concern about how many people are going to show up. Fortunately the sun shone on San Diego and there seemed to be a good number of people in attendance.

This year, for only the second time in history, there was an ARM booth at DAC. In previous years we have shown demos within our partners’ booths but this year we had our own space as well as working with our partners as usual. One of the messages we were promoting at DAC the need for a complete system solution approach to design, as opposed a collection of components designed in isolation of each other. We call this Smarter Systems Solutions and John Heinlein gave a presentation on this subject on the Chip Estimate booth. During DAC, ARM also ...

Are you using a mobile device? Chances are you’re probably reading this blog post on one. You’re also probably reading this with the confidence that your device is doing what you intend it to do. As consumers, we place a lot of demands on not only our mobile devices but also the rest of our personal electronics. We want them to perform all sorts of tasks efficiently, accurately, and with minimal power consumption. As an engineer, you’re aware of the complex embedded SoC’s used in your device to make sure that it does what’s intended. Today’s embedded SoC’s are high performance, heterogeneous, and multi-processing systems.

In the future, most of these embedded SoC’s are likely to contain multiple caches that share a single memory resource. At a high level, cache coherency means that two caches cannot have same cache line in a dirty state and that if a cache contains a cache line in a unique state, that line must not be in another cache. In addition, at least one transaction must always be able make forward progress (no deadlock.) To prevent these cache coherency issues, ARM has included cache coherence extensions in their AMBA 4 protocol specification.

While this is a tremendou...