It’s a floor wax! It’s a dessert topping! It’s the Cortex-M4!

As if ARM’s pantry of microprocessors weren’t already well stocked, now there’s another tasty treat to squeeze on the shelf. The Cortex-M4, revealed just yesterday, combines ingredients from the popular M3 microcontroller with a helping of goodies from the ARM9 and ARM11. The resulting confection is a microcontroller/DSP combination that should suit the tastes of embedded designers the world over.

As its name suggests, the new M4 is part of ARM’s low-end microcontroller range of 32-bit CPU cores that run the new(-ish) Thumb2 instruction set. Like other M-series processors, the M4 is intended for fairly low-cost chips in the $2–$15 range. Indeed, the first M4-based chip from NXP is due out late this year and will likely be priced right around $5 in volume.