Chip designer Arm is unveiling the latest generation of processors that will power future mobile phones. Processors built with the Cortex A8 design will have more than one billion transistors on board and will be many times more powerful than current ones.
Hope to see a mini-itx design with this soon for linux/bsd/riscos users (maybe for wince also)
Well yeah, I’d like to see a nice mini itx too, but it’s going to be 3 years wait at least. Curious though: if one processor runs on 300 mW, does this mean a quadruple-core Arm8 board could run on <2 watts?
And is multi-core arm even sensible at all?
niice..
It does suggest, when you don’t go overboard with the crazy architecture we see in x86,PPC that power can be very low even at high speeds. If 1GHz can be had for <1W, a few cores without the extras could still be had in a chip without fan.
Even miniITX is looking too big for my interests, I want to see some credit card aize boards, the likes of which usually have very slow cpus.
Sounds like it could be great for the Negroponte $100 laptop, except that theyve already committed to the AMD Geode family of embedded x86 procs. Still, I would have liked them to go with either an ARM core or maybe a MIPS core. Perhaps they could have begged IBM to design and fab a cheap low-power PPC? Saddling the developing world with x86 is a crime ;-).
Also a new processor always means high initial prices, but I’d love to see next-gen PDA’s, game boys, and phones with this little guy inside. Anybody know if the classic ARM ISA is dying now that Thumb-2 is here?
–JM
The big setback for the A8 is that ARM do not make their own chips, they design them and other companies licence the design, mod it to their own needs and then produce it, so like the BBC article says, you wont see any until 2008
As for consoles, it is still possible as the Gameboy Advance uses the Arm7 and a few startphones and PDA’s as well, so there’s no stopping them upgrading to ARM8.
Acorn computers and RISCOS are designed to run on ARM compatable processors (and run pretty well IMHO).
2008/09 could be a very interesting year all round then…
Well, ARM was originally an Acorn Department, which was spun off, aslong as they havent removed any instructions from the CPU it should run RiscOS exceptionally well (Intel’s xScale CPU’s have a couple of the instructions which RiscOS requires missing, Intel didnt stick to the Reference design)
surely this is a typo. but it is interesting to find out what the real number is. a million? I can’t find the number on the two arm links provided.
athlon64 doesn’t have more than 120mil transistors if I remember correctly, so a simple low power cpu should have a lot less, not ~10 times as many.
This would go great with a nextgen Linux-based Palm. I would be in heaven.