When they are not making electronic devices such as mobile phones or TVs, the guys and girls at Samsung seem to be doing a lot of other interesting stuff. Stuff such as inventing what they call the fastest ARM Cortex-A8 processor based mobile core in a 45 nanometer low power process. Codenamed Hummingbird, this new mobile core delivers 2000DMIPS at 1GHz and comes with 32KB of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache with a customizable size, as well as an ARM NEON multimedia extension.

“The biggest challenge in mobile processor core design and implementation is to achieve high clock speed performance while keeping the power consumption low,” said Dr. Jae Cheol Son, Vice President, SOC Platform Development, System LSI Division, Samsung Electronics.

“Collaboration between Samsung and Intrinsity combines the best design and implementation technologies in the industry in successfully meeting the aggressive performance and power consumption targets of the Hummingbird. Samsung’s forthcoming SOC products which are based on the Hummingbird will enable our customers to add many more advanced processing capabilities to their mobile products without sacrificing battery life.”

Seeing how, to the best of my knowledge, ARM Cortex processors are used in mobile devices such as electronic toys, medical instrumentation, automotive and industrial control systems and so on, I am looking forward to seeing what this new technology will do for the above mentioned areas and others in which such processors are used.

Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, stated that “The market for both stand-alone and embedded advanced cellphone application processors was $2 billion in 2008, and is expected to grow at 25 percent CAGR to the $6.1 billion level in 2013, with some growth even in recessionary 2009. Our forecast is that ARM's Cortex-A family could account for about half of the total market for mobile application processors by 2013, since ARM already has more than a dozen Cortex-A processor family licensees.”

That sure takes a huge load off my shoulders, how about yours?


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