ARM has produced a hard macro version of its Cortex-A9 processor which has been sold as soft IP since 2007. The idea is to give users of Cortex A9 a high performance version of the macro which can be implemented in designs relatively quickly.
More importantly for ARM, it allows A9 to address other markets than the cellphone market.
The original soft A9 was developed for the handset industry, ARM's core business, and so was made with low-power uppermost in mind, was designed to be run on TSMC's 40nm LP process.
The hard macro A9 is designed to be run on TSMC's high performance 40nm G process.
The hard macro can run at 2GHz. The difference in performance between the low-speed end of the soft IP low-power version and the high-speed end of the hard macro high-performance version, is about 4X.
ARM has 15 licensees for the soft macro including Renesas, ST, Nvidia, Samsung, NXP, Mindspeed, Toshiba, NEC and TI.
Asked why licensees of the soft IP couldn't develop their own high performance version of it, ARM's John Goodacre replied: "They could, but it would probably take them a year to do it."
That's how long it took ARM to do it, though Goodacre wouldn't be drawn on how many people had worked on the hard macro implementation other than to say it had involved 'multiple tens' of man-years.
As it is, it means that a licensee of the hard macro can get a product to market in a year. ARM has got its first licensee for the hard macro who, says Goodacre, "wants to be first" to use it. However, he reckoned it would be "a year before we see it in products."
By contrast, three users of the soft A9 have engineering samples of the macro and should have it out in products in the first half of 2010.
What the hard macro does is get to the non-handset customers - the manufacturers of servers, PCs, games machines, digital TV and enterprise printers.
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