04 October 2007

Symbian and ARM Cooperate in Bringing Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) to Future Phones Enabling High-End PC Capabilities to Consumers’ Pockets

Symbian Limited today announced Symbian OS support for the ARM Symmetric Multi-processor (SMP) architecture. SMP support in future versions of Symbian OS will use multiple CPU cores to provide ‘performance on demand’ – battery life will be improved by accessing cores only when running demanding high-end multimedia applications and powering them down when they are not in use.

This announcement is a milestone in Symbian’s strategy for power efficiency for converged mobile devices, reinforcing Symbian’s position as technology leader.

Symbian and ARM are long standing partners and have successfully collaborated on technology development and product planning for over 10 years. The ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ multicore processor was announced earlier today at the ARM Developers’ Conference. Symbian and ARM are working together closely on supporting Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor-based CPUs in Symbian OS.

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"Symbian’s announcement to support the ARM SMPCore technology is a significant move, bringing the power and performance scalability advantages of SMP to smartphones and other high-end consumer devices," said Mike Inglis, Executive Vice-President, Sales and Marketing, ARM. “Symbian and ARM continue to collaborate in bringing world leading application processor and operating technologies to mobile devices in a highly dynamic market. Together, we plan to deliver exceptional performance combined with outstanding battery life for future mobile devices.”

“Symbian is excited to announce full support for the highly capable ARM SMP multicore technology in Symbian OS,” said Jørgen Behrens, Executive Vice-President, Marketing, Symbian, at the ARM Developers' Conference today. “Symbian OS SMP support will offer performance on demand for future converged mobile devices. It offers exceptional multicore performance for media-rich applications combined with the power efficiency required to continue to deliver industry leading battery life.”

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Multi-processing technology underlies next generation Cortex-A9 processor designs. In converged mobile devices, SMP CPUs consist of multiple cores which can be individually powered up and down by the operating system. This delivers high performance for high-end applications such as games, browser-based intelligent services, and media-rich applications such as video streaming or TV recording, while offering low power consumption when the device is idle or executing less performance-critical tasks.

Symbian believes SMP support is a crucial step in continuing to deliver industry-leading battery life in a world where converged mobile devices offer increasingly performance-demanding features with constant battery capacity.

In order to take full advantage of SMP, Symbian is taking the following technology steps:

• multi-processor support in the Symbian OS kernel and device driver model
• targeted enhancements throughout Symbian OS
• extended Symbian OS developer tools to allow developers to access the benefits of SMP
• Symbian OS validation on Cortex-A9 based hardware and models

Symbian has already started to deliver SMP technologies to its customers and will roll out the above incremental developments in future versions of Symbian OS. Details of this will be announced in due course. The first Cortex-A9 MPCore processor-based Symbian smartphones are expected in 2010.