Hi, I'm new to development with ARM and I was wondering if there is a way to estimate power usage for the different ARM cores (such as ARM Cortex-M0, -M1, -M3, -M4)? I'm thinking of maybe a program that can accept code compiled for these cores and can estimate how much power they would use if they were to run on actual silicon.
You can just trust you with the manufacturer's data. But after all depend on the use that will made . In my opinion the best compromise is the M0 + . This is just my opinion, and I certainly made a mistake .
Hi Jérôme, I am using an ARM M0+ CPU, but i was wondering if there might be a way to estimate how much power I would be using for other ARM cores as well.
Hi Karthik,
This is definitely a "difficult" problem - even on fixed silicon process different manufacturers will choose different standard cells for the physical implementation, which can dramatically alter frequency and power characteristics (in general, the faster you make a device's top frequency the less energy efficient it will be, but this is not always the case, as there is also a tradeoff between lowering dynamic power and increasing static power (leakage)). Also note that the power numbers from ARM are just for the CPU; they ignore the interconnect, peripherals, memory controller, memory PHYs, etc.
For all these reasons the best source for power data is the data sheet for a specific device from that device's manufacturer.
HTH, Pete
Adding to Peter's answer...
The exact power consumption depends on large number of factors:
If you need to get more information, please contact local ARM sales team, they can provide some more data. (But it won't cover all the possible cases).
See Contact ARM - ARM
Hope this helps.
regards,
Joseph