04 June 2009

Opening Up A World Of Infinite Possibilities
Multiprocessing Cortex-A9 Running Symbian OS

In an effort to continue to evolve and the world's most popular smartphone operating system and to further open up a world of infinite possibilities, team at ST-Ericsson, and ARM have managed to run Symbian operating system on a highly capable Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) configuration.

This milestone has been reached by close co-operation with Symbian and its partners and it now offers the potential for device manufacturers to continue the trend of delivering a more personal mobile internet experience.

This is by the way, the first time that dual cortex configuration is validated on production silicon and runs an open mobile operating system and it paving the way for a new category of mobile devices that deliver significantly more processing performance on demand.

The hardware platform is up and running with all interfaces working, including CPU, caches, trace, dual display, memory controller, power management units, modem and RF. The overall system performance is optimized by balancing the applications across the number of instantiated CPU’s and their operating frequencies.

The Symmetric Multiprocessing version of Symbian, with what is the same code base that has been checked in to the Foundation source code repository, runs on the dual core, and they have validated the L1 and L2 caches as well as cache coherency and synchronization between the 2 cores.

The environment consists of an ST-Ericsson U8500 smart phone platform embedding the first silicon implementation of ARM Cortex-A9 multicore (MPCore) processor in the industry. A single instance of the Symbian operating system schedules multiple threads concurrently, distributing the CPU load on the two cores.

This guarantees the best combination of high performance and low power providing an unparalleled capability to build next generation mobile products for a variety of advanced consumer experiences.

See below for some additional technical highlights and try and keep the drool to a minimum.

About the hardware:

• Single chip base band and application processor engine
• HSPA Modem Release7
• ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore

Which can accommodate features and functionality such as:

• HD 1080p camcorder and video
• Up t18 Million pixels camera
• ~100 hours audiplayback time
• 10 hours HD videplayback time
• Simultaneously TV out over HDMI
• Videand Imaging accelerator
• HW accelerated 3D Graphics supporting OpenGL ES2.0
• 2xWVGA (960×854) displays
• Touch UI on 2 displays