ARM announces power-efficient Cortex-A7, big.LITTLE architecture for sharing it
For months, mobile silicon connoisseurs have been looking forward to the ARM Cortex-A15 (above) to deliver feeds and speeds. Those who appreciate battery life, however, could get a kick out of ARM's new Cortex-A7 — coming in 2013. ARM claims the new multi-core processor (which measures just 0.45mm² at 28nm, compared to 2.7mm² for a 45nm Cortex-A8) will deliver the same performance as today's high end handsets while sipping 60 percent less juice from your battery. What's more, ARM's going to pair the low-power chip to that very same Cortex-A15 in something it's calling a big.LITTLE configuration, which dynamically switches between the A15 and A7 as necessary to maximize power efficiency or performance depending on the workload -- somewhat like the extra chips in Nvidia's Kal-El, TI's OMAP 5 and Marvell's Armada 628.
ARM announces Mali-T658 GPU, claims ten times the graphical performance of today's smartphones
The new Mali-T658 is an up-to-eight-core design that builds on the still-in-production Mali-T604, a next-gen chip itself, offering an estimated four times the compute power of that GPU and ten times the graphics performance of the existing Mali-T400, plus a promise to play nice with ARM's big.LITTLE architecture.
ARM's already envisioning PlayStation 3 quality games running on the final silicon when discussing it with the likes of BBC News, and though we've heard claims of console-quality graphics many a time before, it's hard not to be optimistic when ARM-based technology has already come this far.
