cortex processor

With the Cortex-A8, ARM has developed a powerful 32-bit processor with low power consumption that shows a significant performance increase compared to the ARM11 ARM processor. The Cortex-A8 owes this performance increase to a 13-stage pipeline and the superscalar design.

The Cortex-A8 works with two arithmetic units( ALU) and one load/store unit, which are allocated their work by the processor. For special tasks, extension units such as the signal processing unit are still available, which relieve the central processing unit( CPU) when playing MP3 files and videos.

The Cortex processors, which are manufactured in 65 nm technology, work with clock frequencies of up to 1 GHz and achieve 200 DMIPS. Their power consumption is extremely low at 300 mWat 600 MHz. They use the ARM7 instruction set.

The Cortex range is rounded off at the bottom by the Cortex-M1 and M0. The M0 can be seen as the ASIC of Cortex-M1, which is implemented as a Field Programmable Gate Array( FPGA). The Cortex-M0 is extremely economical in power consumption. According to the manufacturer, this is only 85 µW/MHz. The M0 is a strip-down version of the larger Cortex'. It has no memory management unit and only 12,000 gates. The M0 processor is to be used in measurement, control and sensor technology and in combined digital- analog circuits.