ARM processors are occupying new niches for themselves. For a long time, these are not only low-power chips with minimal power consumption. The third generation of ARM Thunder-X processors was recently announced, as we have already covered . Now a processor is introduced that outperforms all previous solutions in the R-series.
It is designed to work in real-time systems, which must be extremely reliable. Those. we are talking about equipment that is operated in extreme conditions. These are industry, medicine, rescue services, etc.
In order for the processor to be able to perform all the required operations, its architecture was slightly modernized and updated. So, Cortex-R is characterized by improved hardware interrupt handling, including deterministic. The hardware division instructions, memory protection (MPU), error correction at all levels (including both system buses and L1 cache) have been improved. There is one more feature - instant "hot" backup in case one of the cores fails.
The chip will work in systems with optimized software that uses hardware resources sparingly. These are not custom applications. Therefore, the developers made the representatives of the R series productive, but without record indicators, as in the A series. Recall that the A series chips are used both in smartphones and in servers.
The new R-series ARM processors are planned to be used, in particular, in compute-on-storage drives. These are smart drives that can perform complex tasks offline without burdening host systems. Accordingly, the performance of host systems when performing the same tasks will be higher.
The developers claim that the Cortex-R series can take on tasks such as transcoding video on the fly, speeding up work with databases or analyzing information in real time. R82, according to the developers, is twice as good as R8 in performance. In typical workloads when working with neural networks, the new processors outperform their “colleagues” by 14 times.
Thanks to the MMU, the processor has the ability to work with virtual memory without limiting the physical volume of DRAM. In addition, R82 optionally supports execution of specific SIMD instructions (ARM NEON), providing data-level parallelism.
Manufacturers of smart drives, including NGD, have already become interested in new processors.
