July 27, 2009

Samsung introduces the 1 GHz mobile CPU core

by anoop

Samsung has announced the industry’s fastest mobile processor core implementation of the dual-issue ARM Cortex-A8 processor architecture in 45nm low-power and low leakage process technology. This Cortex-A8 implementation which was code-named as Hummingbird, delivers 2000DMIPS at 1GHz. It comes with a 32kb each of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache, the size of which can be customized and also an ARM NEON multi-media extension. Samsung is currently developing standard mobile SoC products using this core. To achieve this speed, the Hummingbird utilizes a semi-custom design flow which involves custom designed circuit structures, a set of primitive cells and enhanced RTL FastCore and Fast 14 high-speed domino logic from Intrinsity in its implementation. The biggest challenge is to keep the power consumption as low as possible while keeping the performance speed high. Looks like faster mobiles in the future!
[Aving]