ARM's Neon: Too late to the portable party?

Timed to coincide with the In-Stat Fall Processor Forum this week, ARM announced Neon, an extension to its processor architecture that relies on a new 64/128-bit execution unit and instruction set. According to ARM, the SIMD (single instruction multiple data) architecture will easily handle multimedia and even baseband-wireless processing in mobile and consumer products.

The company cites the ability to run an MP3 audio decoder using less than 10 CPU MHz and a GSM speech codec using only 13 CPU MHz. Neon will offer a software approach to multimedia requirements, while the ARM Optimode technology announced last spring allows designers to spin dedicated cores for specific applications, such as video encoding, that can be implemented much more efficiently with dedicated hardware blocks.

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