Andre Yoskowitz
20 Apr 2011 15:51
ARM Holdings has announced the next step in its plan for computer architecture domination, giving a timetable for the Cortex A15, dual-core designs that can support 16 cores and clock in at 2.5GHz.
The CPUs will be available in devices in late 2012 or early 2013, says James Bruce, the U.S. mobile segment manager at ARM Holdings.
Nvidia and Texas Instruments are the first chipmakers to license the A15, and Qualcomm and Samsung are expected to license the architecture soon.
Most of the current high-end smartphones and tablets use the Cortex A9, which only supports 4 cores and clock in at 2GHz, at most.
Outside of the clock speed and cores, the A15 boasts huge performance boosts and the "efficiency of parallel processing on mobile devices," says DT.
Intel recently stated it would be taking on ARM by creating architectures with 22nm transistors by 2013, beating ARM in power consumption. However, Intel's current offerings are 45nm Atom designs while ARM is already moving to 28nm, in 2011.