British multinational semiconductor company ARM has been moving expeditiously with its expansion plan as the company has already revealed the processors that will be powering up smartphones in the year 2016.
The company's upcoming flagship processor will be named Cortex-A72. The Cortex-A72 CPU is expected to be 3.5 times faster than the company's Cortex-A15 CPU. The latter was first introduced back in 2012, and was incorporated into devices such as the Nexus 10.
Thanks to the rapid evolvement of processors, ARM's upcoming flagship processor will be consuming 75 percent less energy compared to the Cortex-A15 CPU. The aforementioned metric is when both chips are pitted together under the exact same processor load. Because of ARM's big.LITTLE configuration, the Cortex-A72 processor can be paired with a lesser performing CPU in order to balance out performance and energy efficiency effectively, allowing mobile devices to function smoothly as well as provide the necessary battery life to the user.
In this case, the Cortex-A72 CPU will be able to get paired with the existing A53 processor. The A53 processor is currently present in Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 chipset and it possesses a total of four cores. When the Cortex-A53 is paired with the Cortex-A72, it will allow the better performing processor to take care of the more intensive tasks while the lesser performing processor will be able to handle the less taxing applications. This approach is similar to the M7 processor inside the A7 chip incorporated into Apple's iPhone 5s smartphone.
According to ARM, the pairing of these processors will result in 40 to 60 percent reduction in power consumption. In addition, the Cortex-A72's GPU, which has been named the Mali-T880, will be able to deliver performance of up to 1.8 times the performance currently being delivered by the company's Mali-T760 GPU. Furthermore, the upcoming GPU will also be consuming up to 40 percent less power compared to its predecessor.
ARM has not given a confirmed date as to when its future chips will be appearing in smartphones but as the year ends, the company will most likely be providing additional information regarding its chips.
