The first building block unlocks new possibilities, with as many as four low-power Arm® MCU cores each operating at 800 MHz. Power-efficient processing improves the performance of real-time control systems by enabling the use of improved algorithms. For example, motor-control systems can measure vibrations to help prevent wear and energy loss, or add anomaly detection to detect imminent catastrophic failures. These new features require a large increase in computational power, and traditional MCUs have not kept up given their lower clock speeds.

High-performance multicore processing is central to the Sitara AM2x MCU architecture, and provides a combination of performance, efficiency and flexibility. With the flexibility to scale up from single-core up to quad-core, and speeds from 400 MHz to 1 GHz, you can add functionality to your applications without compromising latency. With four R5F cores each running at 800 MHz, the AM2434 can deliver up to 6,400 real-time Dhrystone million instructions per second of computing capability for real-time control. The device’s multicore architecture also allows you to spread operations across different cores, simplifying software scheduling where different functionality runs at different timing intervals.

Separating real-time control from networking, for example, reduces the number of interrupts for a given core and makes it easier to maintain precise control of all operations.