On Sep 26th, ARM announced their new Cortex-A76AE core for automotive application, especially autonomous driving car. ARM doesn’t produce process directly. They sell IP cores with licensees to MCU, CPU and SoC manufactories. They also issue licensees to fabless companies who wish to integrate an ARM core into their designs. ARM core users include Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, ST Microelectronics and etc.
ARM domain the smartphone processor market, almost squeeze Intel out of mobile solution market. ARM architecture mobile processor has become synonymous with smartphone processor.
Safety is an entrance requirement for automotive-class application. Safety is always one of the most important aspects for carmakers. Cortex-A76AE has a new feature called Split-Lock. This feature allows multiple processor cores to be locked together for redundancy in lock mode, or earn higher processing power in split mode. Split-Lock feature also gives the flexibility that wasn’t possible in traditional lock step processors. [2]
Automotive computing in 2020 requires more computing power since the new functions such as autonomous driving. Nowadays, a high-end smartphone is about 30,000-50,000 DMIPS.[3] However, a Level 3 autonomy function requires nearly 350,000 DMIPS, which is about 7 times performance of a high-end smartphone today. Cortex-A76AE is designed for Autonomous Driving, which is largely based on Cortex-A76. It improves the performance by enhancing memory system, increasing integer and vector execution throughput and decoupled branch prediction and instruction fetch. [4]
ARM
[1] Winning Share in automotive semiconductors
[2] Evolving safety systems: Comparing Lock-Step, redundant execution and Split-Lock technologies
[3] Arm: Preparing for the future
[4] Arm Cortex-A76AE: A new age of high-performance processing with advanced safety