Every user wants his smartphone to be fast and crisp, provide support to high resolution videos and battery to last longer than ever. ARM, a British semiconductor and software design company, which powers about 90 percent of smartphones around the world, has announced blueprint of a new processor, the Cortex A72. The Cortex A72 succeeds over the previous design Cortex A57. Improving over the performance parameters of computational speed, graphics and power efficiency have been the prime factors looked upon while its design.
Along with the new processor, ARM also announced new graphics chip – Mali T880 and other new co-processors like Mali-DP550, a display processor and Mali V550, a video processor. The company said that clubbed together, these chips will render support to the 4K resolution video playback. With the Cortex A72 promising to improve the computational speed, the company officials also said that it will provide better power efficiency. This means better battery life for the future devices.
The new Cortex A72 is said to offer console gaming-class performance with better graphics. Talking in exact terms, according to ARM, the Cortex A72 will be 3.5X faster than the 2014’s 32-bit Cortex A15 and consumes 75 percent less power. Currently, A15 powers Nvidia Tegra K1. The new A72 will be enabled to run ARMv7 32-bit and also the ARMv8 64-bit instruction sets. It supports features like hardware virtualization support and TrustZone.
For designing this new processor, the UK based company ARM, had joined hands with a Taiwanese company TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.). ARM Cortex 72 uses TMSC’s, recently developed, 16nm manufacturing technology. This will ensure better power utilization. Keep in mind that the latest in market, Snapdragon 810 processor, uses 20nm manufacturing technology.
Although the Cortex A72 has been announced, users might not see the device equipped with it in near future. This is because, ARM, unlike Intel, has always been more keen to license its technologies. ARM licenses its processor technologies to companies like Qualcomm, Samsung as well as Apple. These processors can be expected to equip in devices by early next year.
ARM officials said that as part of reference designs, ARM will offer Cortex A72 in form of quad core processor clocking at 2.5GHz. But more cores at faster speeds can be speculated based on the fact that Cortex A72 is scalable technology and companies would be able to modify it according to specific design needs. So far, about ten companies have been said to license this new technology which include Rockchip and MediaTek.
Such new processors raise heaps of expectations amongst the smartphone users. With many companies interested in the new Cortex A72 license, one might expect the future devices to support more immersive gaming and interactive applications with less of power consumed.
