A 32-bit RISC microprocessor based on the ARM7 processor core designed by Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. The A710 is the successor to the ARM610 processor. It was released in July 1994 by VLSI Technology Inc. The ARM710 can run at 40MHz (fastest sample 55MHz) dissipating 500mW with a 5V supply or 25MHz with 3.3V supply. It has an 8 kilobyte on-chip cache, memory management unit and write buffer. The ARM700 and ARM710 processors represent a significant improvement over the ARM610 processors. They have a higher maximum clock speed and a number of architectural improvements such as double the size of internal cache, this means that more of any process can be executed internally without accessing the (relatively) slow external memory. Other improvements are an improved write buffer and an enlarged Translation Lookaside Buffer in the MMU. All of these improvements increase the performance of the system and deliver more real performance than a simple comparison of clock speeds would indicate. The ARM710 has been optimised for integer performance. The FPA11 floating point coprocessor has a peak throughput of up to 5 MFLOPS and achieves an average throughput in excess of 3 MFLOPS for a range of calculations. |