In the last decade most companies in the electronics industry have invested significant efforts in streamlining their design, testing, and manufacturing processes. Time-to-market pressures are intensifying; engineers and technical support staff often work overtime to meet product deadlines.  But there’s one task that is still typically slower than molasses in winter—and that’s procurement.

Last month ARM announced a 2 GHz dual-core implementation of the Cortex-A9 that targets high-performance embedded apps. This month ARM is announcing a new processor core: the Cortex-A5 “Sparrow.”

Let’s face it: Applications are getting more complicated.  Chips are getting more complicated.  And engineering teams are generally getting smaller, not larger.  As a result, it’s incumbent on chip vendors to provide robust, easy-to-use development kits.  Design engineers rely on these kits to quickly evaluate chips and prototype key portions of their systems.

The beauty of digital signal processing is that it enables people to convert available processing power into cool new features, better performance, and lower power in their products. There are countless examples, including MP3 players, wireless communications of all kinds, medical imaging, and voice recognition.

On September 21^st 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.

In the early days of DSPs (circa the mid ‘80s), audio compression and other audio algorithms really taxed the performance of the processors available at the time.  And high-level language compilers for DSPs were, for the most part, lame.  Therefore, real-time implementations of audio algorithms almost always required hand-optimized software.  Now, 20 years later, processor performance has improved dramatically, and compilers are much better.  So you might think the days of hand-tuning audio software are behind us.

They’re not.

In 2004 my friend Nick Tredennick wrote an interesting article in which he made the case that the x86 architecture would ultimately dominate embedded applications.  At the time, I thought Nick’s argument was slightly loopy.  But I have to admit that I’m having second thoughts. These second thoughts have almost nothing to do with any snazzy new chips introduced by Intel, and everything to do with software development for multicore processors.

This month Intrinsity and Samsung jointly announced a new, highly optimized implementation of the ARM Cortex-A8 CPU core, called “Hummingbird.” According to Samsung and Intrinsity, an initial Hummingbird sample has achieved 1 GHz in Samsung’s 45nm low-power process. The companies say that Hummingbird is both faster and lower power than other Cortex-A8 implementations, though as of this writing they have declined to provide power data. Samsung says that it is currently developing Hummingbird-based SoCs for mobile products, but has not yet announced any products.