ARM has launched two new licensable processor cores for next-gen mobile and automotive markets as well as applications such as network storage drives and other high-bandwidth devices.
The chips are especially suited to so-called mobile baseband applications such as LTE and LTE-Advanced for faster mobile connectivity.
Although we won't see relevant hardware on the market for some time, the Cambridge company has announced the Cortex-R5 MPCore and Cortex-R7 MPCore chips now to enable its partners to get going with designs.
The provision of a roadmap of Cortex R-Series processors also enables ARM's partners to future-proof designs based on a single consistent architecture. While the Cortex-R5 is being implemented in designs now, the Cortex-R7 is further out and is intended for LTE designs we'll see on the market in 2014.
"[The CPU] is one track for us, the other track enables the other part of the system that keeps the processor fed," explains Richard York, Director of Product Marketing at ARM.
"In mobile you need to keep them fed and that's where baseband comes in. These processors are for those kinds of embedded tasks. They're crucial as [the phone's processor] needs to be fed. We see this when we drift into a poor network coverage area when [your phone drops [out]."
"We've been talking to the people who are tasked with working on those parts of the system [and they are] telling us they need more and more performance."
Both the Cortex-R5 MPCore and Cortex-R7 MPCore processors can be implemented in product designs as either single or dual cores.
