Little brother
UK low power chip designer ARM has announced the latest addition to its Cortex A family of application processor designs - the Cortex A5 - and is positioning it as the processor to bring Internet connectivity to the "next billion" users.
The Cortex A5 apparently shares many of the capabilities of its older siblings - the Cortex A8 and A9, which are to be found in the highest-end smartphones today - but is smaller and more power-efficient. The smaller size will mean lower price, as more can be produced on one silicon wafer. On the other hand, it's still scalable to four cores.
Ian Drew, ARM's executive VP of marketing, spoke exclusively to HEXUS.channel to give the announcement some context. "Think of the performance of your smartphone at the moment - there's obviously a place under the leading edge for something else," he said.
"The Cortex A5 is the processor for the masses. Its performance is higher than ARM 11, which is typically found in your Nokia volume phone, but slightly lower than Cortex A8. It can run all the same stuff as the A8 and A9, but is smaller and more efficient. For example, Flash is not optimized for ARM11, but it is for the Cortex family."
The Cortex A5 is being launched at ARM's jamboree for its ecosystem - Techcon3 - which kicks off today. Interestingly, among the platinum sponsors of the event are Marvell, which has just launched its latest ARM based offering targeting the PC space, and Microsoft, whose apparently reluctance to produce a full version of Windows that runs on the ARM instruction set remains the single biggest obstacle to ARM's ambitions in the PC space.
