Nufront announces dual-core Cortex A9 System-on-a-chip

ARM Technologies and Chinese company Nufront announced System-on-a Chip, NuSmart 2816, based on dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, operating at frequencies up to 2 GHz. Besides two CPU cores, the SoC includes graphics and video processors and various peripherals. The 2816 will target ultra-thin laptop, netbook, tablet and nettop markets, and the first NuSmart-based product will be available for display at Consumer Electronics Show 2011 in Las Vegas. Nufront plans to introduce more NuSmart systems-on-a-chip in 2011.

NuSmart 2816 chip, built on 40nm technology process, integrates two Cortex A9 cores clocked at 1.6 GHz - 2 GHz, multi-core 2D and 3D graphics processor, video processor, memory controller, and various peripherals that provide hard disk, removable storage, USB 2.0 and 100Mbit Ethernet connectivity. Each CPU core includes Floating-Point and multimedia co-processors, and uses its own 32 KB level 1 instruction and data caches. In addition to this the SoC includes 1 MB L2 cache. Graphics processor supports OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenVG 1.1 standards, and has up to 800M pixel/s and 45M triangle/s fill rate. Video processor supports 1080p video decoding, and can handle H.264, MPEG2, MPEG-4, RMVB and other video formats. Integrated memory controller supports up to 2 GB of DDR2, DDR3 and LPDDR memory with transfer rates 667, 800 and 1066 MT/s. The NuSmart 2816 chip has SATA II, eSATA hard drive interfaces, and works with SD, MMC and SDIO removable storage. Typical power consumption of the NuSmart 2816 is less than 2W. This was achieved by using a number of low-power techniques, including powering down idle CPU or graphics cores, and dynamically adjusting CPU frequency. The 2816 SoC is manufactured in 23mm x 23mm Flip-Chip BGA package.