New development should strengthen the position of ARM Company

The expansion of portable devices’ market is very fast. This has resulted in willingness of Intel and AMD to move ARM from the pedestal, since its micro-processors are used in the majority of portable device we see today for long time now. Concerning this segments, Intel is offering its own series of Atom micro-chips, whereas AMD has Brazos platform to enter Portable device segment.

However, ARM is not going to give away its positions so easily. Starting from September 2010, the company has announced a new line-up of micro-processors, video cards and system logic, designed to show the performance of a new level.

The top quad-core processor Cortex-A15, capable of operating at clocks up-to 2.5 GHz is five times faster than its predecessor. The description says the chip can support up-to 1 Tb of memory using Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE), memory and L1/L2 cache error correction, 128-bit SIMD registers.

Mali-T604 graphics processor (GPU) features up-to 4 cores and shader processors. Again, the performance of Mali series GPUs brings x5 performance. Another interesting thing to note — Mali-T604 has support for OpenCL, which allows this graphics chip to be used for General-purpose computing (GPGPU). The list of supported API includes OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenVG 1.1, OpenCL 1.1, OpenCL 1.2 and DirectX. Currently, the chip is supported by following operating systems Android, Linux and Symbian. It is possible that the list will soon be updated with one of Windows 7 platforms.

CoreLink DMC-400 memory controller supports Low Power DDR2 (LPDDR2) and DDR3 specifications while MMU-400 memory visualization module distributes the available capacity for all devices.

Shred CoreLink CCI-400 Cache Coherent Interconnect can provide a coherent access for two quad-core CPUs and one GPU.

All these parts are to place on a single chip (SOC) and produced at Samsung fabs using 32nm LP High-K Metal Gate [HKMG] process logic, (later to be replaced by 28 nm chips).The main question — When? According to ARM road-map dual-core processors Cornex-A15 will hit the market somewhere in 2012: