ARM core to bring 500% performance boost to smartphones

According to Mike Inglis, pictured, general manager of ARM's processor division, the launch marks the beginning of a new era for the ARM Partnership. "It brings together more than 20 years of ARM expertise in low power design with a host of new and very aggressive high performance technologies," he said. "The Cortex-A15 MPCore processor will become the next major step along the industry's energy efficient computing roadmap and open up a wide range of new application possibilities for our partners." ARM notes the Cortex-A15 MPCore is the result of work with lead licensee partners Samsung, ST Ericsson and Texas Instruments, who were key drivers of the definition of the core. The Cortex-A15 – which is application compatible with other Cortex-A processors – adds hardware support for OS virtualisation, soft error recovery, larger memory addressability and system coherency. While remaining true to ARM's power-efficient design heritage, the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor brings a new level of performance scalability as well as a feature set that enables ARM Partners to address a range of innovative and traditional markets with a single processor architecture. The Cortex-A15 processor is targeted at manufacture in 32nm, 28nm and future geometries.