ARM Holdings, the company whose microprocessor IP powers the vast majority of smartphones, consumer electronics products, printers, cameras, hard drives and a lot of other applications, this week announced development of its first ARMv8-R processor core for real-time embedded apps. The new core will belong to the ARM Cortex-R family of solutions.

Not a lot of information is known about the new Cortex-R processor, except the fact that its code-name is “Kite”, it is based on the ARMv8-R architecture and it is already available for licensing by select partners. ARM officially positions its “Kite” core for advanced real-time embedded systems, such as safety-related automotive applications.

The ARMv8-R architecture shares some features and capabilities with the ARMv8-A (including virtualization), but it is not a 64-bit processor architecture. The ARMv8-R offers higher performance, improved clock-rate potential as well as increased amount of cores in SMP [symmetric multi-processor] configurations.

ARM Cortex-R processors are used for computing solutions for embedded systems where reliability, high availability, fault tolerance, maintainability and deterministic real-time responses are crucial.

Improved performance of “Kite” and ARMv8-R will improve safety and responsiveness of cars, reliability of sensors and will enable better communications equipment.

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KitGuru Says: ARM’s v8 architecture is slowly expanding its presence in the market. The technology is more expensive to license than the ARMv7, which means that as the ARMv8 is gaining popularity, ARM’s revenues and profits are increasing.

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