• State Accepted Answer
  • +1 person also asked this people also asked this
  • Locked Locked
  • Replies 6 replies
  • Subscribers 350 subscribers
  • Views 9275 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
Related
How was your experience today?
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Is there a way for me to estimate power usage for various ARM cores (Cortex-M0,1,3,4 )?

Karthik Ganesan

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.

Parents Reply Children
  • 0 Arm Employee Badge in reply to Karthik Ganesan

    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

  • +1 Arm Employee Badge in reply to Peter Harris

    Adding to Peter's answer...

    The exact power consumption depends on large number of factors:

    • Cell libraries
    • Synthesis tools
    • Timing constraints
    • Synthesis options (e.g. clock skew, fan out limit)
    • Other implementation options (floor plan, scan insertion, etc)
    • Processor's configuration options (e.g. how many IRQ to support, do you need MPU? etc)
    • Exact signal toggling activities (Note: even running the same program code with different data can get different results).
    • Environmental factors (temperature, voltage, phase of the moon... just kidding )

    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