Benchmark group says NXP has fastest Cortex-M3 MCUs

LONDON — NXP Semiconductors' LPC1700 series microcontrollers, based on ARM's Cortex-M3 cores, have been ratified as the industry's highest performance Cortex-M3 based microcontroller by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC).

The Consortium says the LPC1700 executes application code on average 35 percent faster than other Cortex-M3 competitors when running at the same clock speeds, and suggest the performance advantage is even greater when the devices run at higher clock speeds.

EEMBC has certified the microcontroller at 72,100, and 120 MHz, the performance and efficiency put down as a consequence of the architecture of the microcontroller and the use of flexible direct memory access (DMA).

The LPC1700 series is targeted at high-bandwidth communications peripherals.

"Our EEMBC results confirm that the LPC1700 series is now the fastest and most efficient Cortex-M3 available in the market," said Geoff Lees, vice president and general manager, microcontroller product line, NXP Semiconductors.

Lees added a version with 512 kbytes of flash memory is being readied so that the company can offer "the broadest range of 32-bit MCU options."

Markus Levy, president of EEMBC, commented: "These certified EEMBC results highlight the fact that the design of the microcontroller and its memory interfaces is equally as important as the processor core itself."

In March at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, NXP demonstrated what it said was the first functional ARM Cortex-M0 silicon.

NXP plans to introduce the Cortex-M0 processor based LPC1100 series at the beginning of 2010. The LPC1100 will target battery applications, e-metering, consumer peripherals, remote sensors, and virtually all 16-bit applications.

Related Articles

NXP first to demo ARM Cortex-M0 silicon

Benchmarking basics, part 1: Choosing and using benchmarks

A New Way To Benchmark Energy Cost of Embedded Processor Performance