Renesas to show quad, octo 'big-little' chips at MWC

LONDON – Renesas Mobile has two big-little processors set to show up at the Mobile World Congress, which takes place Feb. 25 to 28 in Barcelona Spain.

Renesas is preparing to demonstrate the MP6530 2.2 big-little quad-core communication processor with integrated GSM-through-LTE modem – the first silicon has left the foundry in Taiwan. In addition Renesas has a 4.4 big-little applications processor with four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 processor cores but no modem on-board the company said.

Big-little is an approach to energy efficiency developed by processor IP licensor ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England) that enables application software to switch between cores optimized for low power and high performance for an overall energy saving in typical use where equipment spends much of its time in standby mode.

The quad-core MP6530 has already been tipped (see Renesas' big-little LTE processor wins praise) but the company has now provided more detail.

The processor with its integrated modem is intended for use in mid- to high-end smartphones costing between $200 and $400 and is designed to support multiple cameras and multiple displays.

The multidisplay use case is when LTE is used to download material such as a video which is then displayed on television at high-definition, typically over an HDMI cable. For graphics Renesas has selected the PowerVR SGX544 GPU core from Imagination Technologies Group plc.

The memory access is via a dual-channel LPDDR3-standard interface with a bandwidth of 800-Mbytes per second per channel.

The MP6530 is implemented in 28nm planar bulk CMOS by foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan) and has a target performance of a maximum clock frequency for the Cortex-A15 cores of 2GHz and for the Cortex-A7 cores of 1-GHz, the company said.

This would result in approximately three times the computing and graphics performance of Renesas Mobile's established MP5232, the company said.

The communications processor is also designed to support cameras of up 20-megapixels resolution and burst shoot photograph at up to 30 frames per second in addition to support for simultaneous 1080p30 video encoding and decoding.

Click on image to enlarge.
MP6530 platform diagram with communications processor shown center. Source: Renesas.


Renasas sources said the MP6530 is expected to be in mobile phones that are in the market in the fourth quarter of 2013 and the company is already in discussion with multiple OEMs.

The company said that its normal procedure is work on monolithic application processors and modems at the leading edge and then combine them into a monolithic communication processor. The Renesas Octo-core is a stand-alone applications processor that forms part of that method of working, the company said.


Related links and articles:

www.renesasmobile.com

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