ARM Cortex M3 - Who's utilizing it?

Nope. The ATtiny2313/V number above is based on simulation like the M3 figure. The Cortex-M3 figure includes the standard peripherals that are part of the core.

In most cases power consumption is measured while running a benchmark such as Dhrystone, so no peripherals are used. With a process tuned for power the leakage current of the peripherals would be minimal.

Peripherals only consume power if you enable and use them. But even then most don't use much power, eg. a UART running at 100K baud still uses a fraction of a core at 10MHz.

No. You forgot to take into account the process geometry. The Cortex-M3 number is for 180nm, the 996HS for 130nm. According to datapoints for the similar ARM946E-S, power consumption improves by a factor of

3 to 3.5 on a 180nm process. So Cortex-M3 would still win by a good margin. Maybe we will get a Cortex-M3HS too?

There is 4 of them btw. I'm sure they are still happy - there are lots of reasons for using the M3.

Indeed.

Wilco

..but no more than your Tiny2313 Cortex comparison

mA/MHz can improve, but the Static Icc effects are starting to bite at those gemoetries, so often the focus has to shift from scaled speed, to clawing back some of the precious lost static uA...

Yes, a Cortex-M3HS would be an interesting device. Especially with the right Flash speed, and peripheral mix..

( tho it might confuse the market, with two M3 variants... )

-jg

The datasheets didn't give the process, however this page gives some hints:

All 180nm libraries use 1.8V like the Tiny2313, so it is likely 180nm.

180nm isn't nearly as bad as 90nm... But it matters mostly when sleeping, that is why there are various sleep states that power down large parts of the chip (at the cost of slower wakeup). Voltage scaling may be affected too, it is better to run at a slightly higher frequency than running at a lower voltage/frequency for longer (and thus use more static current).

True, it might be possible to take advantage of asynchronous logic, such as optimizing for the average rather than worst case (eg. use ripple carry adders instead of lookahead). This would allow for even smaller sizes without a large performance penalty.

Wilco

The Tiny2313 is a 1.8-5.5V process, so I very much doubt it is 180nm, more likely 0,35um. Ulf will know ? :)

-jg

Given the nature of the smart card business (paranoid) you are hardly likely to know yet..

Besides I think the cortex is aimed at a different market.

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Yes, because it's quite brazen and they don't even try to hide it. Do they really think anyone would take them seriously with such wild claims?

The 3x speedup over ARM is complete nonsense. The benchmarks in question are floating point, and it is hardly surprising a CPU with an FPU outperforms one that uses emulation. With an FPU the ARM part becomes 4x faster. Where is that revolutionary performance lead now?

The documents don't mention floating point anywhere (no FP instructions either, only mention of an optional FPU in the user guide), so it looks like they are misleading on purpose.

They must be very deperate then :-)

Almost everything has been done before, not much chance for skipping a generation. You would need to build a 1+ Ghz 2-way out-of-order chip, and compete head on with PowerPC / x86 Geode.

Even the Itanium didn't turn out to be much of a revolution...

Wilco

Almost, but not quite. As well as a number of additions there are a few omissions.

-- Jim Garside

As always, people will have to make their own tests.

The AVR32 has SIMD (Single Issue/Instruction, Multiple Data) similar to Pentium/MMX and this speeds up things vs ARM in multimedia benchmarks and string instructions

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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
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This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
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Sure, but overstating things means people will be disappointed. In order to get a design win you generally need to be better than the competition in most areas, eg. power, performance, area, codesize, tool support etc. If all of the advantage is based on a bogus claim then people will start looking more closely at the other areas too...

Interestingly eventhough power consumption was mentioned as a key advantage, I couldn't find any estimates. Same for area. I'm wondering why that is?

You mean like the ARM media instructions? They provide a similar speedup on the ARM because the instruction set is almost identical. Indeed, the ARM compiler uses some of them in string functions. EEMBC doesn't contain any benchmarks that are trivially vectorizable, so you typically only get any gains in hand written assembler code. Although the maximum speedup is 4x, most of the time you're lucky to get 1.5-2x. To get bigger speedups you need to have plenty of registers and use very wide SIMD.

Wilco

Smart cards are very area and cost sensitive. ARM7 is already big for a smart card, AVR32 must be about 10 times bigger even without caches. Small (16KB) caches typically double the area. Cortex-M3 is smaller than ARM7 and so more suitable for smartcards.

Wilco

Yes, it is 0.35u

-- Best Regards, Ulf Samuelsson snipped-for-privacy@a-t-m-e-l.com This message is intended to be my own personal view and it may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

I think this will be sorted out soon enough after the silicon is released.

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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
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This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

More info is leaking out, prior to their much hyped release (where DO they get the "embedded world will change forever" nonsense) ?

Called the STELLARIS family.

Seems they have one of the HIGHEST priced development solutions around.

Core Speed ? : 20MHz core ?

Code size : Same as LPC2101 series, well, _one_ of the series.

8K is your only choice thus far. [ This is a single sourced core, that needs new tools : so pray your first design always stays under 8K ]

ADC performance: OOps, sorry, no ADC. Is this the first new uC to release _without_ an ADC ?

Package: Strange choice - a SO28 : Thick, with large PCB area ?

Models: Seems you can have 2 Comparators, OR 2 PWM, but not both ?

Nothing really stellar in that feature lineup, the LPC210x seems to have it outflanked in all areas.

More interesting silicon is the multi-cored Propellor chip at Parallax.

-jg

..and it seems you need one development kit per variant ?! - Mouser show separate catalogue numbers for the 3S102 and 3S101 - surely that is a mistake ? -jg

The development kit has a base that is common to both devices, and a daughter board with the device mounted. I believe the daughter board can be purchased separately.

Regards, Richard.

*Now for ARM CORTEX M3!*