Industry Expert Blogs

Arm Cortex-M85: Breaking new grounds with Cortex-M

Faced with more demanding compute requirements, Cortex-M microcontroller system developers are faced with a choice: optimizing software to squeeze more processing per clock cycle from their current microcontroller, or migrate their code base to a different, higher-performing microprocessor class. The Cortex-M microcontroller offers many benefits, such as determinism, short interrupt latencies, and advanced low-power management modes. The choice of moving to a different microprocessor class, say a Cortex-A based microprocessor, means that some of those wanted Cortex-M benefits are forfeited.

Recently, Cortex-M microcontroller vendors have been able to offer higher-performing Cortex-M microcontrollers. This allows system designers to easily migrate from a, say, 150MHz Cortex-M4 or Cortex-M33 device to Cortex-M7 devices clocked at over 600MHz. Benefits inherent to Cortex-M, such as support from the extensive ecosystem of tools and software are maintained. But what happens when even more processing performance is required?

Today, Arm announces the Cortex-M85, the highest performing Cortex-M processor delivering unprecedented performance levels across the board. It is the first Cortex-M to deliver over 6 CoreMarks/MHz and more than 3 DMIPS/MHz. This level of scalar performance is achieved thanks to many innovative features at the microarchitecture level, including optimized dual issue and selective triple issue capability, improved branch prediction, and an enhanced memory system including data prefetching, among others.

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