Before I say why I think Eldar Martazin didn’t see a 2011 Nokia MID, let me take the chance to tell you a little bit about ARM’s ‘Sparrow’ platform.
When I first heard news about it a few weeks ago I was a little confused about where it was positioned on the scale of ARM cores as it looked to overlap the ARM11 MPCore designs. I fired off a query to a contact in ARM and they came back with some information that has enabled me to better position it.
It’s a symmetric multi-processing platform that uses cheap (read simple) cores with the ARM V7 instructions set used in the high-end Cortex cores. I liken it to a multi-core Atom CPU which is focusing on cheap, small, low-power and ‘reasonable’ performance. ARM say that it will enable performance as you see today in the high-end Cortex devices at a much lower cost. The multi-processing element will, I assume, allow cores to be dialled in and out for either power-saving or processing power. Its going to offer 2009 high-end performance at feature-phone sizes and prices.
