New AMBA4 Specs Optimise Coherency for mulitcore SOCs

Compute performance in screen-based devices has increased over 700 times since the mid 1990’s. New technologies, such as high-performance heterogeneous multicore processing, have emerged to help drive this growth in performance. These new technologies have increased demand on System IP, particularly at a memory sub-system, hardware and software level. Challenges that stem from latency, bandwidth, power and performance still need to be addressed. Therefore, effective hardware coherency is becoming increasingly crucial to minimize off chip memory traffic and software cache maintenance, which saves processor cycles.

AMBA is the de facto standard on-chip interconnect methodology and is supported by the vast majority of the digital electronics industry. The direction of the latest specification has been driven by a wide group of leading semiconductor, EDA and verification vendors, including Arteris, Cadence, Jasper, Marvell, Mentor, Sonics, ST Ericsson, Synopsys and Xilinx.

“Marvell has been an active contributor to the standardization of hardware coherency within the AMBA 4 specification,” said Hongyi Chen, Vice President of Engineering in Processor Design at Marvell Semiconductor. “A key benefit of AMBA4 ACE is the provision of a development ecosystem with a standard protocol that makes future hardware design far easier. This protocol enables transparent management of cache coherency that removes a significant burden from software engineers.”

“ST-Ericsson has been a longstanding supporter of the need of hardware assist for coherency as systems become ever more complex,” said Jim Nicholas, Vice President & General Manager of Processor Subsystems & Product Lifecycle Management at ST-Ericsson. “As one of the first licensees of the ARM CoreLink™ CCI-400 Cache Coherent Interconnect, we welcome the introduction of the AMBA 4 ACE specification which will enable our energy efficient high performance wireless platforms to exploit the full potential of heterogeneous multiprocessing.”

“Xilinx fully supports the standardization and advancement of hardware resources for the software community,” said Lawrence Getman, Vice President of Processing Platforms, Xilinx. “AMBA 4 ACE strengthens the ecosystem’s ability to create coherent on-chip memory solutions that further optimize the performance of systems driven by a combination of ARM CPU and programmable logic-based processing.”

“Designers of complex heterogeneous, embedded multi-processing SoCs now require robust specifications, design & verification tools and systems IP. This ensures their devices minimize off-chip memory transactions, while maximizing performance and power efficiency,” said Michael Dimelow, Marketing Director, Processor Division, ARM. “AMBA 4 ACE is a major component to enabling the successful development and deployment of future Cortex-A and Mali GPU processor sub-systems- by ensuring the optimum combination of performance and energy efficiency.”