The Development Solutions Group is happy to announce that the latest release of Arm Development Studio is now available. This 2020.1 release showcases the continued improvement in support of the latest Arm IP within our flagship toolchain. A focus for this release has been developer productivity, especially from the perspective of those of you likely to be continuing to work remotely for the foreseeable future.
This release includes by default the latest iteration of the Arm Compiler, version 6.15. The compiler continues to lead the industry with first and best support for the Arm architecture and offers performance and code size improvements over previous releases. In particular, a new link-time-optimization level (-Omin) can be used to target code size for highly constrained devices.
Ever maturing support for newer technologies, for example Cortex-M55 and Helium, yields significant performance improvements over earlier compiler releases, as this table shows:
CMSIS-DSP workload
Intrinsics % improvement
Auto-vec % improvement
BasicMath
34.5%
10.0%
ComplexMath
28.2%
13.5%
Filtering
21.0%
7.3%
Matrix
19.8%
6.0%
Statistics
50.5%
12.7%
Support
29.5%
20.5%
Transform
17.3%
6.7%
Further information can be found in the compiler release notes, available from the standalone download page.
Users of legacy Arm Compiler 5 will find the latest maintenance release 5.06u7 installed. This is the final update to Arm Compiler 5, no further maintenance is planned. We strongly recommend all users of this toolchain migrate to Arm Compiler 6. Did you know we have produced a comprehensive Migration Guide to assist with this process?
Development Studio Gold Edition users will also have access to the latest 6.6.4 functional safety qualified compiler release (downloadable separately).
The project manager and debugger are built on the Eclipse framework. To maintain compatibility with the many plug-ins that are available to this environment, we have updated the Eclipse SDK version to be 4.15. Though many users may not immediately notice a difference, this release brings stability and other improvements.
When launching the IDE for the first time, a new preferences wizard will pop up, allowing you to configure common IDE settings. Of course, these can subsequently be changed from the preferences menu.
It is likely that users may not be local to the hardware they are working with. Perhaps you are working from home, connected to a board in your office location, or the board is in a different laboratory. Within the latest DSTREAM family firmware (7.4) provided with Development Studio 2020.1, we have added a new dashboard, which you can access simply by pointing your browser to the IP address of your debug hardware. From there, you can see the various status LEDs, as well as the ability to remotely restart the unit if necessary.
Do not forget that you can use the Configure IP pane within the Development Studio IDE to make any connection settings if necessary.
We have also made improvements to the number of CoreSight components the tool handle in a single connection which is now 4096. This allows DSTREAM-ST and DSTREAM-PT hardware to support the latest infrastructure focused platforms with very many processors and other IP therein.
The Streamline Performance Analyzer has been extended to support the performance counters of the Ethos NPUs, with the Arm NN library. This enables users to further enhance the visualization of execution of their ML algorithms, ensuring efficient usage of the NPU, and to compare performance of systems with and without the NPU acceleration.
All supplied FVPs have been updated to use the latest version (11.12) of Fast Models. Debug connections now support Iris by default, offering improved debug performance and ease of connection to remote systems. Connection with the CADI interface is still supported, but is deprecated. We recommend migrating any existing setup to use Iris. If launching the model from the IDE, this is as simple as selecting Iris from the pull down when creating the model connection. If launching the model externally, replace the command option --cadi-server (-S) with --iris-server (-I).
Existing users of Development Studio (Gold, Silver, or Bronze editions) can download the 2020.1 release now. Linux and Windows hosts are supported. For users of the Platinum Edition, the 2020.b release will be available in mid-November, containing all the updates mentioned above, as well as additional support for as yet unannounced IP. A Development Studio license also enables Keil MDK. For information on the latest MDK release, see here.
New to Development Studio? A fully featured (equivalent to the Gold Edition) 30-day evaluation is also available.
Download Development Studio 2020.1