On September 21st ARM announced a new high-speed, hard macro implementation of the Cortex-A9 architecture, called “Osprey.” (A hard macro is a physical implementation of an IP block in a specific process.) Osprey is a dual-core implementation of the Cortex-A9 and according to ARM, it will run at up to 2 GHz in a 40 nm (TSMC 40G) fabrication process. Like other Cortex-A9 variants, Osprey includes a floating-point unit (FPU) and NEON SIMD signal processing unit for each core.
ARM will offer two hard macro variants: a 2 GHz (typical) speed-optimized variant, and a power-optimized variant that runs at up to 800 MHz (worst-case). According to ARM, the dual cores plus 32K of L1 instruction cache, 32K of L1 data cache, and an L2 cache controller consume 6.7 mm² when optimized for speed and 4.9 mm² when optimized for power (both figures are for the TSMC 40G process). Power consumption is projected by ARM to be 1.9 W for the high-speed version or 0.5 W for the power-optimized version.
The high-speed Osprey version targets high-performance applications such as enterprise servers, networking, and printers. The power-optimized version targets mobile computing applications, smart books, and consumer applications. With the new hard macro implementations, ARM believes it can take on the PowerPC, x86, and MIPS64 processors in high-performance applications. According to ARM, a 2 GHz Osprey will be significantly faster than a 1.6 GHz Atom, which wouldn’t be surprising since Atom is a single-core device. BDTI has not benchmarked the Cortex-A9 (or the Atom), but expects that the Cortex-A9’s results on BDTI’s benchmark suites will be similar to those of the Cortex-A8 (assuming single-core variants of both). Benchmark results for the Cortex-A8 are available at /Resources/BenchmarkResults/BDTIMark2000.
ARM’s announcement comes on the heels of Intrinsity and Samsung’s joint announcement of the “Hummingbird” core last month. Hummingbird is a high-speed implementation of the Cortex-A8 that runs at up to 1 GHz in Samsung’s 45 nm low-power process. The companies have not released power consumption data for the core. Samsung has said that it will be selling SoCs based on Hummingbird, and based on the announced sample speed of 1 GHz, these SoCs may have a similar clock speed to some Osprey-based SoCs—but Osprey is a dual-core device while Hummingbird is single-core, so they are fairly different birds.
According to ARM, Osprey has been licensed to one customer, and ARM expects consumer devices incorporating Osprey to be available as early as the first half of next year.
Add new comment