ARM launches new chip for hard drives, autos

Chip designer ARM has released the Cortex 4, an energy-efficient processor for hard drives, cars, modems and printers. The Cortex 4 is the third member of the Cortex family. The more powerful Cortex A8 is targeted at handhelds while the less powerful M3 is for industrial systems.

Like most chips today, the company sought to balance performance with power consumption. One technique: the Cortex 4 comes with a unit that pre-fetches data from memory for the processor.

"You can mask memory latency to a certain degree" with the technology, said John Cornish, an exec at ARM. The pre-fetch function also lets the hard drive designer use slightly, slower cheaper memory, which uses less energy, without denting performance.

ARM does not make chips itself. Instead, it licenses the design to manufacturers such as Texas Instruments and Intel, who then produce chips. In this manner, ARM chips have become the dominant processors in the cell phone market.

Silicon based on the Cortex 4 design will likely start rolling out in the first quarter of 2007 with products following three to nine months later.