ARM Cortex-M7: Abundance of Memory or Not Enough?

Karen Field, EETimes
10/28/2014 10:50 AM EDT

10/28/2014 BOSTON, Mass. -- There’s no question that the ARM Cortex M7 -- with its robust memory and processing power -- extends the capabilities of the microcontroller in ways that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. Significant is the fact that the processor is positioned to become a core building block in the Internet of Things (IoT).

To wit, ST Micro’s STM32 F7, which won best-of-show at ARM TechCon in September and is the first 32-bit MCU family to feature the ARM Cortex-M7 core has 320KB of SRAM and 1024KB of flash. Atmel’s Cortex M7 parts, not yet announced, are expected to have on the order of 384KB of SRAM and 2MBs of flash. That’s ten times more than for the typical MCU.

But, whether the Cortex M7 has the necessary resources to “get the job done” depends an awful lot on who you ask. What is telling in itself: the giant hairball of decisions and trade-offs in hardware, software, and systems that today’s embedded developers say they wrestle with in a design space that seems almost unconstrained at times.

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