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Will Cortex A7 Accelerate Android?
Texas Instruments (TI) said ARM’s heterogeneous ‘Big.little’ architecture helps it accelerate Google’s Android operating system.
TI, which designs the popular range of OMAP system-on-chip (SoC) processors found in many smartphones told The INQUIRER that ARM’s newly unveiled Big.little architecture will help improve overall performance of the Android operating system.
Avner Goren, GM of OMAP Strategy at TI told The INQUIRER that ARM’s Big.little architecture, which uses Cortex A7 and Cortex A15 cores, addresses a different need than that of multi-core processors made up of identical cores.
Goren said, “We have been using heterogeneous multi-cores since 2002, we always had an ARM CPU coupled to accelerators for video, graphics, DSPs, image processing. This [Big.little] doesn’t change anything in this idea. On the contrary, it builds on this concept and it is another dimension. None of what was held here changes what we are doing in the rest of the system.”
Goren continued by saying that Big.little is a natural progression from the multi-core, accelerator-aided processors of yesteryear. “What we have held today doesn’t change the fact I would continue doing accelerators, DSPs, video accelerators and use [Cortex] M3s inside, but it changes what I’m doing on the high-level Android side.”
When ARM’s multi-core processors tipped up at Mobile World Congress earlier this year firms were banging on about it would be a golden age of power efficiency due to being able to run multiple cores at lower frequencies. Now less than a year later and with dual-core smartphones still having relatively poor battery life, it looks like that strategy has gone for a Burton. Goren admits that homogenous multi-core architectures do have a problem.
“Multicores give you scalability in a range, performance goes up and down within this range based on how many cores are active and what is the voltage level for these cores. On the other hand it has a floor, this floor is when you have one core running at the lowest voltage. What we have identified is a need for general processing power, meaning running Android, even at a lower [power] level,” said Goren.
Goren said ARM’s A7 processor will allow TI to ramp up the Cortex A15 core without hurting the ‘idle’ performance of the more frequently used Cortex A7 core.
ARM Has Explosive Quarter
ARM is kicking but this quarter by reporting another yet another quarter yesterday, their sales were up 26 percent year-over-year.
The revenues for ARM hit $191 million, with a profit of about $35.5 million. Unfortunately, the bad currency exchange rates reduced the profit to $20.3 million.
Analysts are estimating that about 1.85 billion ARM-licensed chips were manufactured this quarter and global shipments are expected to surpass 8 billion units by the end of the year, making ARM a part of the billion dollar club.
The sales were driven by the strong demand for smartphones and tablets which ARM owns a considerable share of the market since many manufacturers use their processors like the Cortex.
Software Issues Plague ARM Servers
PC World is reporting software issues are hurting the ARM Processors and may inhibit it from being a serious contender to x86 Processors. Dell Computer started testing some of the processors in low-end servers to appease some of their larger clients. It appears that these companies were interested in the low power and density in data centers.
Dell’s General Manager of Server Platforms stated “he had major concerns about the weak software ecosystem surrounding ARM. He said that there are lots of advantages from the architecture even if it means porting your code over to that new instruction set and maintaining two different software stacks. But he said that there are time and cost issues associated with porting software from x86 to ARM.” Read More….