
Codezero microkernel developers announced support for the quad core Cortex-A9 processors in their recently released
v0.3 kernel. Codezero is an open source L4 microkernel variant written in C that evolves the L4 API for security and virtualization purposes. With the recent announcement Codezero team is probing the possibility of having their microkernel as an open source option for enabling virtual rooms of execution on high-end, multi-core mobile platforms. Cortex-A9 is the latest flagship product of ARM plc UK. With its unbeatable performance to power ratio, it is known as the biggest rival of Intel Atom line of cpus on the mobile cpu arena.
Member since:
2008-04-21
For a project, ARM has kindly allowed me remote access to a prototype quad-core A9 cpu to test and profile NEON code. While I cannot disclose any benchmarks right now, I can definitely say that this cpu will take the world by storm. As a SIMD design, NEON is better than both SSE and AltiVec, it's excellent, versatile and it's FAST. Plus, ARM is backing it very strongly -much more than IBM/Freescale backed up AltiVec. Aside from NEON, a quad-core A9 has an extremely powerful VFP unit -forget A8 and previous slow ARM FP performance- and it consumes very very little power.
What can I say, I'd definitely buy such a laptop or even a server based on that chip. I honestly think that no matter what Intel do, they have to support so much cruft, that they can't beat ARM on a power/performance ratio and soon, they'll have a competitor pure-performance-wise.