Samsung has developed the new HummingBird, the world’s fastest ARM Cortex-A8 processor that runs at 1GHz, as to challenge Qualcomm’s SnapDragon. The HummingBird is based on 45 nanometer (nm) Low Power (LP), low leakage process technology and has 32KB each of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache with customizable size and an ARM NEON multi-media extension.
Samsung’s hummingbird utilizes a semi-custom design flow which involves custom designed circuit/memory structures, a set of customized primitive cells, and the enhanced RTL FastCore and Fast14 high-speed domino logic from Intrinsity in its implementation. It is designed to offer high performance but with a low power consumption that is ideal for use in mobile devices such as smartphone, MID.
The Korean company is now working on a standard mobile SoC products using this new core.
