ARM has the details about its new Cortex A17-design revealed. Soc on the basis of the design for mainstream smartphones and tablets, the cores will support big.little setups with full system coherence, and the first devices in 2015 to be expected.
Cortex A17 cores are approximately 60 percent faster than current A9 variants, but ARM also speaks of increased efficiency of 20 percent. Four A17 cores in big.little constellations are used, in combination with four Cortex A7 cores with Heterogeneous Multi-Processing gives the freedom all the combinations of cores to workloads.
Unlike the name suggests, the A17, not as the successor of the A15 be seen: ARM focuses the design on the mainstream and not on the high end. The A17 is just like the A12 is still a 32bit design on the ARMv7 architecture to be erected. The Cortex A17 is a further development of the A12, so also observes Anandtech, while the performance of mobile apps at the level of the A15 would come to lie. At present, chipmakers the Cortex A15 cores for high-end-soc’s, such as Samsung for its Exynos. For the future high-end ARM Cortex A57 in the pipeline, which, among other 64bit processing and the ARMv8 architecture is based on.
In addition to use in smartphones and tablets provides ARM that chips with the cores in smart tvs and cars. In addition, it extends the design firm the Mali T720 gpu to forward to with the cores combined. Finally, the company expects the first generation on 28nm will be produced, with a move to 20nm at a later stage.
