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.
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