320 MHz core clock is very impressive, compare to <= 200 MHz typical of Cortex-M3/4 impls. However at this freq, flash (instruction) readout becomes the bottlen

320 MHz core clock is very impressive, compare to <= 200 MHz typical of Cortex-M3/4 impls. However at this freq, flash (instruction) readout becomes the bottleneck. While Cortex-M chips typically include some on-chip flash acceleration, this chip instead went for external flash + I-Cache. The new Cortex-M7 chip STM32F7 has both flash accel and I-Cache. It remains to be seen whether this chip can sustain real-world workloads at 320 MHz with 0 wait state. Even at 200 MHz it has the potential to replace proprietary fixed-point low-end DSP chips.