ARM announces its Cortex-A7, Cortex-A15 and its big.LITTLE architecture

Today ARM announced their upcoming Cortex-A7 architecture, designed with both affordability and battery life in mind. It also has a multi-core A15 ready for next year, which will offer as much as 2.5GHz speeds with A9 like energy consumption, by using the 28nm production process.

ARM holdings are the moving force behind Samsung’s Exynos, Apple’s A5, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and Texas Instruments’ OMAP4, which are found in the top smartphones and tablets today.

ARM has shifted their focus on improving the power consumption in its chips as well as their price. The 28nm Kingfisher Cortex-A7 cores flaunt the features of A15, but will offer 5x the energy efficiency of today's 1GHz Cortex-A8. That means you will be getting 50% more power at one fifth of the size.

The company has also shared its plans to combine the Cortex-A7 with the Cortex-A15 in a package it refers to as the big.LITTLE system. Here the A15 chips take on the heavier tasks while the A7 processors will take over when less energy consumption is needed. ARM believes this endeavor will lead to $100 handsets in 2013 with the power of today’s mainstream smartphones.

Meanwhile the Cortex-A7 will offer a great option to emerging markets, where most Internet access is expected to come from entry level smartphones. Companies like Samsung and Text Instruments have already licensed the technology.

ARM also claims it is exploring the 20nm production process, which would improve the price/performance/battery life ratio even further.



source – ARM Holdings