TI was proud to participate in the public launch this week of the ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore processor as the advanced lead partner and first licensee of this game-changing technology. It has been a long time coming, with initial planning with ARM going back to 2005 to evolve mobile devices beyond smartphones.
We have seen a rapid pace of performance and innovations in mobile devices over the past couple years fueled by power-efficient, high-performance processing provided by the ARM Cortex-A cores. The ARM Cortex-A8 core, first deployed into production in 2008 in the TI OMAP™ 3 applications processor, significantly raised the bar by enabling new, immersive web browsing and user experiences. The ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore further boosts processing performance with architectural enhancements and the ability to scale with multiple cores and run Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) operating systems. New and enhanced user experiences are enabled by the TI OMAP 4 dual-core 1 GHz+ Cortex-A9 MPCore processors that will power the next generation of smartphones coming to the market in the near future. OMAP 4 demonstrations such as dual-screen contextual browsing, gesture recognition, 1080p high-definition video, amazing 3D gaming experiences and many others have been showcased at industry events and on YouTube throughout 2010. There is strong industry demand for this next generation of devices which bring these new mobile experiences to the masses and will further fuel the strong smartphone market.
The ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore will be a catalyst for the future mobile device transformation, not just because of its significant, power-efficient, performance boost, but with the system-level enhancements it enables. A couple key features include support for an extended address space and hardware virtualization. An extended address space will support larger memories to enable enhanced computing experiences and more advanced applications in a mobile device. Hardware virtualization opens up a whole new opportunity to efficiently take advantage of multiple, simultaneous operating environments. This could be used to support independent corporate and personal environments or multiple operating systems that provide unique experiences or services. VirtualLogix gave a glimpse of this future mobile virtualization this week by showcasing three mobile operating systems (Android 2.2, ChromeOS and Ubuntu Linux) running simultaneously on the TI OMAP 4 Blaze™ mobile development platform (MDP). By leveraging the Cortex-A15 hardware support, the virtualization experience can be enhanced with improved performance and security. The combination of significant performance improvement, larger memory and virtualization will open up many new opportunities, and will drive new use models and experiences for mobile devices. I believe this will be the start of the next era of computing being led by ARM processor cores integrated in TI OMAP applications processors.
One last key point that we can’t forget is that we have to do all of this in a constrained power budget defined by the device size and battery limitations. Amazingly, the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor can provide a very high level of performance and still operate within a mobile power budget; especially when implemented in combination with our new TI SmartReflex™ 3 performance and power management technologies. We have been able to show that we can actually reduce power for web browsing up to 60% with future OMAP applications processors.
The future of mobile devices will be exciting, as we watch them transform into a new breed enabled by key technologies such as the ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore processor.
If you are interested to hear more, I will discuss this evolution further in a presentation titled “The next big thing to transform mobile devices” at the upcoming 2010 ARM Technology Conference on November 10th in Santa Clara, California.
