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ARM has announced new multi-core processor designs for embedded applications such as baseband processing in smartphones, offering a boost in performance much needed as high-speed mobile network standards such as LTE are adopted.

The Cortex-R5 MPCore and the Cortex-R7 MPCore have been designed to meet the growing processing overhead required to handle next-generation mobile baseband protocols, according to ARM, and are the first dual-core-capable chips in the Cortex-R line.

"Both of these have been driven by our tier-one customers making baseband modems who have been saying they are running out of performance and need more for protocols like LTE," said Richard York, vice president of product marketing at ARM.

The Cortex-R family is designed for embedded applications where a real-time response is required, unlike ARM's Cortex-A processors (http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/analysis/2269599/arm-processor-find-home-servers) used to run the actual operating system and applications on smartphones.

However, the baseband processor is as important as the application processor for overall handset performance, York said.

"If you feed LTE into a mobile device, you need a powerful embedded subsystem to handle that," he explained.

The Cortex-R5 design, available immediately, extends the feature set of the existing Cortex-R4 chips, used in many 3G baseband products, providing headroom for LTE while maintaining backwards compatibility, according to ARM.

Meanwhile, the Cortex-R7 introduces advanced features such as out-of-order execution, improved branch prediction and faster hardware support for functions such as floating point.

ARM said that the Cortex-R7, which is due for release in Q3, should deliver 50 per cent more performance than the R5.

However, both have been designed with dual-core capability, the first Cortex-R chips to have this option, which provides handset designers with interesting possibilities, according to Andrew Frame, CPU product manager at ARM.

"You could separate out the protocols onto different cores, so that one is running the Layer-2 stack and the other handles the Layer-3 stack," he said.

As ARM does not manufacture chips itself, the first silicon will come from ARM licensees such as Renesas (http://redirectingat.com/?id=3305X606534&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.renesas.com%2F&sref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.v3.co.uk%2Fv3%2Fnews%2F2274499%2Farm-chips-drive-lte) in about 12 to 18 months, and should appear in production handsets by the end of 2012.

This timeframe should fit with widespread deployment of LTE, and early implementations of the faster LTE Advanced standard, according to ARM.

Smartphones are potentially the largest market for the new processors, but the Cortex-R5 and Cortex-R7 will also be used in hard drives and solid state drives, as well as printers, network appliances and automotive applications.

Source:-   V3.co.uk (http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2274499/arm-chips-drive-lte).