ARM chips to power 1GHz mobiles

Increased power efficiency an added bonus

Chip designer ARM has introduced a new processor architecture designed to significantly boost performance of future phones and other mobile devices.

It will enable mobile chips running up to 1GHz and brings together key ARM technologies for the first time, such as the TrustZone for security and Neon multimedia acceleration.

The Cortex-A8 is ARM's next generation of processor for mobile devices, representing an order-of-mag- nitude improvement over chips used in today's handsets, according to Rob Coombs of ARM's mobile segment. "We are going from about 150MHz in the ARM9-based chips to about 600MHz to 800MHz in the first Cortex-A8 products," Coombs said, adding that the focus of the new design is to provide better multimedia support while keeping power consumption low.

ARM does not make chips itself, but licenses designs to firms such as Texas Instruments, Philips and Samsung. Coombs said five of the top 10 chip makers have already committed to processors based on Cortex-A8, and that handsets using these chips will arrive in 2007 or 2008.

Unlike earlier ARM chips, the Cortex-A8 is superscalar. It has two instruction pipelines, so it can execute more than one instruction simultaneously. It also has new technology like ARM's Neon and Jazelle RCT to boost specific tasks. Neon is a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) unit to speed multimedia processing, as Intel's SSE does in Pentium chips. Jazelle RCT provides hardware support to boost Java apps.

The Cortex-A8 is the first chip design to feature either Neon or Jazelle, Coombs said. Faster mobile chips are necessary, according to ARM, because phones are starting to run more demanding apps like games, video, handwriting-recognition, productivity tools, and speech input. This mix means chips have to be flexible enough to cope with specialised acceleration tasks as well as speedy general purpose processing.

"It's a tough challenge to have a powerful processor that is also adaptable, " Coombs said. Also included in Cortex-A8 is ARM's TrustZone, which creates a secure partition within the chip for running security critical code and storing sensitive data. It also features ARM's Intelligent Energy Manager (IEM) technology for power efficiency.