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MWC: ARM says different cores in multi-core chips are possible
CHIP DESIGNER ARM said it will be possible to mix and match different cores in its future chips.
ARM licenses its chip designs to all of the big embedded chip designers including Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Nvidia and Broadcom among others. Three of those firms announced new chips based on ARM designs at Mobile World Congress, with multi-core being the buzzword.
However, the conventional wisdom is that all the cores on a dual or quad-core chip are identical, but according to Bob Morris, director of mobile computing at ARM, that need not be so.
While Morris demonstrated the advantages of a dual core ARM Cortex A9 chip over a single core variant, he said that there is nothing in ARM's design that would stop a firm such as Qualcomm from making a dual core chip consisting of, say, a Cortex A9 core and a Cortex A5 core to hit a specific power rating.
Morris said that multi-core chips are not just the preserve of gamers but that running multiple cores at lower voltages provides significantly lower power usage.
In a demonstration to The INQUIRER, ARM ran a real-time benchmark consisting of loading a number of websites in a loop. Not surprisingly the dual core chip finished the benchmark first, in around 44 seconds compared to the single core variant's 55 seconds, but the dual core chip utilisation during the benchmark had far fewer 100 per cent utilisation peaks.
These peaks are important not only because the chip draws the most power when it is 'maxed out' but because power leakage is at its highest, explained Morris. The idea of multi-core chips is to minimise the number of times a single core hits 100 per cent utilisation.
The ability to mix and match cores will mean that firms can run less powerful cores for tasks such as music playback but engage more power hungry cores when more compute heavy applications such as games are run.
So while companies are promoting multi-core chips for gaming and 3D video, they can also be used for the less glamourous but more useful goal of increasing battery life. µ
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MS should consider this kind of architecture for Xbox 3 for the reasons stated. The dashboard and minor games (XBLA) don't need maximum power.
and having mentioned coherency, neither to top teir games. I'm wondering if it would harm development to stash UI processes on one low power core, and have all the heavier load processes (AI, physics etc) be dedicated to gpu cores like the intel sandy bridge setup.
The problem with sandy bridge and consoles though is that having a junk GPU like intel's baked on the chip might as well be relegated to only 2D tasks (like UI) while a discreet GPU seems almost always mandatory for gaming.
For Xbox 3 having a low power combined solution to just boot the thing and have it idle at low power draw, would be great. But 2 multicore GPU chips (for better 3D rendering and multiple screen support, each with their own frame buffer) seems the ultimate way to go to avoid being trapped by ass graphics computing power (sandy bridge)
@nexekho: The DS will have had two separate CPUs, not one CPU with two cores. The article is referring to more than one type of core on the same bit of silicon.
I like this idea. A lot. I hope the SoC manufacturers pick this up and run...
What is new here that these are SMP cores with coherent memory, so the OS can seamlessly migrate processes between a slow core and a faster one if required, and turn off any unused cores.
This is not possible with Cortex-M cores as these don't have an MMU, identical instruction set, Neon or coherency support.
@mwc2011
omap5 is dual cortex a15
Dual Cortex A9 With Two M4. Does that count as well?
Has this guy never heard of a DS? Had two cores, an ARM9 @ 66mHz which had access to 3D/the new cart slot and an ARM7 @ 33mHz (underclocked to 16mHz when emulating the GBA) which had access to sound, input and the GBA slot.