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Nordic intend to use Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33?

I just bought a nrf51 dk to master this wonderful SoC series.

For now I intend to keep my research and studies with Bluetooth 4.1, but would like to prepare for a jump to the next version. And the following doubt arose.

Does Nordic intend to launch some series similar to nRF5 with Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33 microcontrollers?

Thank you.

  • Just a footnote (before you get answer from Nordic support team that Nordic never discus future products and roadmaps openly on this forum;): nRF51 is 5-6 years old design on ARM Cortex-M0, you should already now move to nRF52 which is ARM Cortex-M4F. Hard to say what would be the benefits of utilizing new super duper M23/33 but upcoming nRF52840 (still on ARM Cortex-M4F but with USB, full BT5 LE radio PHY feature set and IEEE 802.15.4 and ARM TrustZone CC310) - which has engineering samples out there for almost a year and should have production version with volumes in the distribution channels almost every day - seems to satisfy all the needs of low-power non-wifi radio chip today (in my opinion).

  • @endnode, I fully understand the strategic issues in not discussing the future of products openly. But I thought it important to ask, I know that the Cortex-M23 and CortexM33 released at the end of the year 2015 and are still little adopted by most manufacturers.

    The Cortex-M4F, is already a grid jump mainly by the presence of the FPU that contributes much to accelerate compaction and a pre-processing that can reduce the sending of data without increasing the consumption. And already endo the TrustZone cell, práaicamente becomes equivalent to the M33, if I am not mistaken.

  • Well I'm one of these old-fashion morons who believe that no embedded system should compute trigonometry or other things but if you really need it then yes, M4F has some DSP instructions which can help. Still I estimate this as 1% of so called "IoT" and similar applications, all the rest can and should do data processing elsewhere (in the mobile up or in the backend).

    Point is: chips like Nordic's nRF5x has not only ARM Cortex-M architecture but also proprietary RF block design and other HW peripherals. To migrate it to new architecture is already big step so it happens in ~3-year cycles. It must be really strong reason to go to M23/33 (although it would be great to have even more secure HW features not only CryptoCell accelerator...)

  • unfortunately the need to use the least possible data transmission time via Bluetooth LE makes it necessary to have to pack such collected data, thus necessitating an efficient processing unit for this type of operation. the ASIC that I'm going to use already does all the necessary processing, but the amount of data generated has been heavy, but from what I've been reading from BLE 5, I do not think I'll have this problem due to the speed of transmission. But I still have to maintain compatibility with version 4.1 due to the great legacy in the market that I am focused on.

  • Hard to judge without any quantification;) Also choosing nRF51 to "master this wonderful SoC series" is strange choice as you can read everywhere that nRF52832 and nRF52840 are the latest and more powerful chips...

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