Posted on Monday, June 03 2013 @ 19:57 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
ARM revealed details about its Cortex A12, a new design due to arrive next year. This chip will sit somewhere between the existing Cortex A9 and Cortex A15 in terms of performance, it promises to be around 40 percent faster than the A9 at the same clockspeeds, while maintaining the same power consumption. Full details
at ARS Technica.
As you might guess from its name, the Cortex A12 sits somewhere in between the existing Cortex A9 and Cortex A15 in performance. It's about 40 percent faster than the A9 at the same clock speed to be exact, but thanks to design changes and manufacturing improvements its power consumption should remain roughly level with Cortex A9. A12-based SoCs should be making it into production by late 2014 and shipping to customers in early 2015.
While the performance and power consumption of the CPU design is of primary interest here, the A12 also imports a few features from the A15. These include 40-bit memory addressing (supporting up to 1TB of RAM), ARM's virtualization extensions and TrustZone security support, and the ability to be paired with lower-power Cortex A7 cores in a big.LITTLE arrangement (though such a configuration doesn't make as much sense with the A12 as it does with the more power-hungry A15).
