Advanced Risc Machines Ltd has announced a new high-end 32-bit RISC processor, the ARM9 to respond to ever-increasing demand for higher performance processors for embedded applications such as personal digital assistants, smart mobile phones, set-top boxes and modem switches. The ARM9 takes the best of the ARM7, with its Thumb technology, a 32-bit processor with a 16-bit sub-set to enable greater code density, and offers more than twice the performance of the ARM7 core. The company says makers of mobile phones and PDAs are offering more and more features to users, all of which require greater processing power, but they still require a low cost, small die size, with low power consumption and space to add the necessary extra circuits. Strictly speaking, the ARM9 sits between the company’s ARM8 and StrongARM products, although ARM8 does not have the thumb technology, and it sounds as if it will be superseded by ARM9. It is cheaper than the StrongARM because it has smaller caches, and is therefore also more embeddable. Tudor Brown, the Cambridge, UK company’s chief technical officer, says the ARM7 family will continue to be widely used and supported for the mass consumer products, while the ARM9 will be adopted for the higher end products.
