If you’re into mobile devices, it’s hard to ignore ARM, who supplies and maintain architectures for most mobile SoC (System on a Chip) makers.
The company has released details on its new, mid-range Cortex CPU and Mali GPU architectures for 2014 at Computex, Taipei.
The Cambridge-based firm hit Taiwan to showcase their latest and (mid) greatest; the Cortex-A12, and Mali- T622.
Aiming at the rising mid-range market, of which ARM classifies as between $150 to $350, the new architectures are developed for maximising performance whilst lowering power consumption.
The Cortex A12 is claimed to be both more capable than and just as efficient as the previous A9 whilst boosting speeds 40% in terms of single-thread operations. This package is all in a chip which manages to be 30% smaller due to a 28nm build process.
As for other features; the A12 utilises ARM’s “big.LITTLE” processing. This form of processing allows a higher-powered chip (such as the A12) to be coupled with a low-powered chip (such as the A7) so the device can switch between processors for power-saving, or when demanding tasks occur.
For GPU aficionados; the Mali-T622 offers a 50% boost to efficiency over its own predecessor (T604.) The T622 packs support for multi-core rendering up to OpenGL ES 3.0, DirectX 11, and OpenCL 1.1.
Finally, ARM has announced the Mali-V500 video solution to enable a single-core to encode 1080p at 60fps, or decode 4K video at 120fps for output on a supported display (until our mobile devices end up with crazy 4K screens!)
What do you think ARM’s latest architectures will mean for the mid-range market? Are you looking forward to the potential of decoding 4K video from a single-core?
