Broadcom licenses ARM's Cortex-A9

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 29 September 2009, 19:23 IST
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London: Broadcom, a fabless communications chip company has licensed the Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor from ARM Holdings, a processor intellectual property (IP) licensor. The processor will be implemented in some mobile and wireless applications, reports EE Times. The Cortex-A9 MPCore processor can contain up to four independently-configured cores carrying out multiple tasks on each one in parallel. A uniprocessor software model is possible by utilizing one of the many symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)-aware operating systems. According to ARM, a single core Cortex-A9 processor is capable of delivering twice the performance of currently available smartphone processors and a four-CPU Cortex-A9 processor cluster is capable of delivering 10,000 aggregate Dhrystone MIPS (DMIPS) when clocked at 1GHz. Cortex-A9 is being tipped as a rival to the Intel Atom and its descendants, for use in netbook and notebook computers. "The flexibility and scalability of the Cortex-A9 processor enables us to optimize development costs by addressing the requirements of wireless applications from a common core platform," said Nambi Seshadri, Chief Technology Officer of the Mobile Platforms and Wireless Connectivity division of Broadcom. In addition to the Cortex-A9 processor, Broadcom has licensed the NEON single instruction, multiple data hardware accelerator technology which is useful for multimedia, gaming and compute-intensive applications.

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