ARM unveils super efficient Cortex A7, will be paired with A15
ARM has unveiled a new chip that will enable more efficient and affordable mobile processors.Based on the company’s 28nm fabrication, the Cortex A7 reportedly consumes five times less power and measures one-fifth the size of the 45nm Cortex A8, which is used inside the Apple A4, Samsung Hummingbird and Texas Instruments OMAP3. ARM will compliment that efficiency by pairing the Cortex A7 with quicker, more power hungry processing cores.
The company’s heterogeneous “Big.LITTLE” design concept will see the Cortex A7 packaged with the upcoming Cortex A15 as a system-on-a-chip that will allocate tasks to the best available core. The A7 will compute lighter loads while the A15 will tackle requests that are more intensive. It’s worth noting that the efficiency gains mentioned above are specifically limited to the A7 so it’s unclear what you can expect from this package as a whole, but it should be awesome.
The A15 was announced last September and is expected to ship sometime in early 2012. It will be offered in various flavors with clock speeds up to 2.5GHz and it’s said to deliver 40% more performance than the A9. Several licensees have already announced next-generation SoCs based on the A15, including Nvidia’s fourth-gen Tegra “Wayne,” Texas Instruments’ OMAP 5 and ST-Ericsson’s Nova A9600. Samsung, LG, Apple and others will undoubtedly utilize A15 cores as well.
Tags: ARM, Big.LITTLE, Cortex A15, Cortex A7, Texas Instruments OMAP3
Hardware | admin | 
October 21, 2011 3:12 pm | 
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