Cortex 8,9,10 what is the difference

sebastianj

I have seen this variations of cortex mentioned with tablets, does any one know what these are? is there a reliability issue or just different makes.
thanks in advance.
sebastian

penrhyn

One more time in English;)

mr_fishbulb

They are the processor in the tablet. Cortex are a series of chips made by ARM - http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/index.php

penrhyn

Aha, good to known Acorn still doing well, were in the news today (O Boy).

neilwoods

Does anyone even bother to search for this type of info before asking here any more.

Some people are just to lazy for there own good

-TangleFoot-

mr_fishbulb wrote: »

made by ARM

Designed by ARM.

As an IP core business, ARM Holdings itself does not manufacture its own electronic chips, but licenses its designs to other semiconductor manufacturers. ARM-based processors and systems on a chip include the Qualcomm Snapdragon, nVidia Tegra, and Texas Instruments OMAP, as well as ARM's Cortex series and Apple System on Chips (used in its iPhones). The name was originally an acronym for Advanced RISC Machine, and in its early days Acorn RISC Machine.

Johnmcl7

sebastianj wrote: »

I have seen this variations of cortex mentioned with tablets, does any one know what these are? is there a reliability issue or just different makes.
thanks in advance.
sebastian

Basically they offer different performance a bit like you get Core i3, i5, i7 processors and different generations of them. ARM design the processor but they don't manufacture it so companies buy the design and can either produce the processor straight off or redesign it for their own needs.

The Cortex A8 is now of the older Cortex designs and was the high end version at the time replacing the older ARM11 design. Original verions were clocked at around 500-600Mhz and later ones were faster at around 1Ghz.

The Cortex A9 replaced the A8 and is faster plus it could be used in multicore configurations so generally dual Cortex A9's replaced the single 1Ghz Cortex A8's and quad Cortex A9's are replacing the dual Cortex A9's.

The Cortex A15 is currently the fastest of these processors and available in a dual core version in the Chromebook and the Google Nexus 10.

There are also more basic versions of these processors such as the Cortex A5 and Cortex A7 which are somtimes used in budget phones or placed alongside more powerful cores to offer a more power efficient devices. Samsung have announced an eight core platform with four A15's and four A7's with the idea being the device will use the more powerful A15's when it needs the performance and then switch to the lower power A7's when it doesn't to reduce power consumption.

There's also some companies who take the ARM design and rather than produce a standard Cortex processor they produce their own version such as Qualcomm did with the popular Snapdragon platform which used the Scorpion core. Initially this was clocked higher than the Cortex A8's (was released after them) and had a mix of features from the Cortex A8 and Cortex A9. They've now moved onto the new and much more powerful Snapdragon S4 platform known as 'Krait' which is what the Google Nexus 4 is using.

Apple used the Cortex processors as well but recently with the Ipad 4 and Iphone 5 have switched to their own custom implementation.

Like a computer there is more to platform than just the processor, companies choose the processor, graphics card, ram etc. and produce a SoC (System on a Chip) which is why you'll see Samsung phones for example being listed as having Exynos hardware as that's their name for their platform. Nvidia call theirs the Tegra series, the Tegra 2 was a dual Cortex A9 platform, the Tegra three a quad cortex A9 platform (with a fifth A9 for power saving) and the new Tegra 4 platform is a quad cortex A15 platform.

John

sebastianj

This is what I call real education, thank you very much John.
Regarding google search for info, it was done but if you don't understand or not trust the info then it needs to be asked.
Many thanks for the info John, Tanglefoot.
sebastian