Two weeks after being acquired, ARM presented Softbank with a "gift"

Robotics> Robot Network News: Earlier this month, Softbank bought ARM for 32 billion US dollars. With ARM's monopoly in the mobile processor market, this huge amount of acquisition is reasonable, but according to industry analysis at the time, Softbank’s motivation to acquire ARM. It actually comes from its Internet of Things plan. In less than two weeks, ARM offered Softbank a “big gift”.

Recently, ARM released the Cortex-R52 processor, the first product after Softbank’s acquisition. It is understood that the processor is based on the new ARMv8-R architecture and is mainly used in the Internet of Things industry.

The Cortex-R52 supports up to 4 cores. Compared to the Cortex-R5, the performance increases by 35%, context switching (disordering) is increased by 14 times, entrance preemption is increased by 2 times, and hardware virtualization technology is supported.

ARM also revealed that in the future, the central control system can directly use Cortex-R52, but in industrial robots and ADAS, Cortex-A and MaliGPU (of course, it is to sell its own products) must be used to enhance overall operations.

ARMv8-R architecture

ARMv1~ARMv8, these are actually instruction-set architectures, and most people now call them architectures. The ARMv8-R used by the Cortex-R52 is a new architecture released by ARM in 2013, and the Cortex-R52 is also the first processor based on this architecture.

We see that the Cortex-A72, A57, and A53 and other application processors are all based on 64-bit ARMv8-A. Although only one word is different, ARMv8-R is the biggest change in the ARM architecture so far. It has not only been used. The 32-bit instruction set also introduces features such as virtualization and separation.