This article published today in EETimes Europe quotes Freescale’s Lisa Su, Senior VP and General Manager of the Networking and Multimedia Group, who says that her group will be announcing an SoC based on the ARM Cortex-A15 processor core in the “near future.” The article, titled “Multicore is mandatory, claims Freescale CEO” is mostly about the remarks of Freescale CEO and Chairman Rich Beyer’s keynote address at the Freescale Technology Forum being held right now in San Antonio, Texas. Beyer’s premise is that the era of “connected intelligence” makes multicore SoC design mandatory because embedded and consumer designs can no longer follow the PC’s power path. There just isn’t enough power for that.
Beyer also predicted that tablet shipments would surpass PC shipments within five years as media consumption becomes the major driver for such devices. More and richer media accessed via broadband links escalates the need for processing power and the industry seems to agree that the way to get that processing boost is through multicore design. Freescale already offers a line of i.MX SoCs containing single, dual, and quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor cores. In fact, Freescale used the Technology Forum as the venue for the first public demonstration of the company’s quad-core i.MX 6Quad application processor SoC.
(Just added a detailed video of i.MX6 demo board. Lots of technical details. http://j.mp/iZaFCA)
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