ARM’s new embedded chip will boost device performance

With appliances and cars getting more intricate touchscreen displays, they needed detailed controls and added computing brainpower, which chip designer ARM looked to provide with a new processor architecture it unveiled yesterday called the Cortex-M7, CNET reported.

The Cambridge, UK-based company designs chips that find application in most smartphones  and also adds blueprints for processors that embed in devices including watches, smart metres, refrigerators and thermostats. The smallest design under the Cortex-M line, is the M0, which when built would fit within a dimple of a golfball.

At the other end of the spectrum, the M7 would become the new power-lifter of the Cortex-M series, providing twice the processing power of the M4, which currently offered packed the maximum computing power in the line.

Though ARM had already provided Cortex-M designs for 8 billion microcontrollers and embedded chips over the past 10 years, the M7 could help evolve the line as more appliances and devices around the home increased in complexity and the need to communicate with each other and the outside world.

According to Ian Johnson, an ARM senior product manager, whereas a tiny, 8-bit microcontrollers might have been sufficient at one time, a much more powerful device was needed in the world where the devices were far more connected.

The Register quoted an ARM source as saying the Cortex-M7 had a superscalar pipeline which could execute two instructions simultaneously.

He added, the Cortex-M4 could execute just one instruction at one time which was where much of the speed came from. The Cortex-M7 could run at a higher clock frequency than Cortex-M4 – together these gave on average two-times uplift in DSP performance for Cortex-M7 over Cortex-M4.

DSP (digital signal processing) was especially useful for the efficient juggling of incoming streams of audio and video data, and performing fast motor control – better than a generic CPU core could manage.

With the doubling of performance, ARM reckoned appliances and gadgets using the M7 could more quickly perform the complex mathematics required to finely control motor movement in robots; analyse microphone, touchscreen, and other sensor data; and encrypt telemetry before it was sent over the air.