ARM gives up "Cortex"

ARM is throwing its entire naming scheme overboard. The company's probably best-known brand name is also history: Cortex. Until now, the vast majority of ARM standard cores had a name with Cortex. This currently ranges from the Cortex-M33 for microcontrollers to the Cortex-X925 for smartphones and notebooks.

In future, each processor class will have its own core name. New CPU cores for smartphones are called Lumex. For desktop PCs and notebooks, Niva cores are coming – not to be confused with the chip design company Nuvia, which Qualcomm took over because of its custom cores. Licensees who design their own cores will of course continue to use their own names.

Microcontroller cores are given the name Orbis and automotive chips Zena. Only server processors already had their own name, which ARM is retaining: Neoverse.

ARM is also introducing additional names for different performance classes: Ultra, Premium, Pro, Nano and Pico. It is unclear what the generation names will look like. A successor to the Cortex-X925 could be called Lumex Ultra 1 or Lumex Ultra Gen 1, for example. It is questionable what a successor to the Cortex-A525 efficiency core could be called – perhaps Lumex Nano 1. For microcontrollers, the combination Orbis Pico seems obvious.

More attention on PCs?

ARM does not yet have its own CPU cores for desktop PCs and notebooks. Instead, licensees such as Mediatek have so far used the largest smartphone cores, whereby they can configure the caches to different sizes, among other things. Mediatek's and Nvidia's jointly designed GB10 processor, for example, has ten Cortex-X925 and ten Cortex-A725 cores.

A separate name for desktop PCs and notebooks suggests that ARM could invest more resources in the development of corresponding cores in the future. On the other hand, different names for largely identical cores in different areas of application would be less spectacular.

(mma)