ARM Cortex-A50 chips coming in 2014, bringing higher performance, lower power consumption

Chip designer ARM has announced that it’s next-generation chips should arrive in 2014. ARM Cortex-A50 chips will be the first ARM-based processors to feature 64-bit processing, and at launch there will be two versions — one aimed at significantly boosting performance, and the other at reducing power consumption.

The new chips designs are the first to be based on ARMv8 architecture, andfeature a 20nm design.
Companies including AMD, Broadcom, Calxeda, and HiSilicon are expected to develop products around the new platform.
ARM Cortex-A57
This chip architecture is designed to offer 3 times the performance of today’s fastest ARM chips (based on Cortex-A15 designs) without increasing power consumption.
ARM Cortex-A50 chips also feature backward-compatibility with applications developed for 32-bit processors, and support for the latest ARM Mali graphics.
The chip designer is positioning ARM Cortex-A57 as the successor to Cortex-A15.
ARM Cortex-A53
ARM’s Cortex-A53 design is a follow-up to the low power ARM Cortex-A7 architecture.
While this chip design isn’t as fast as the A57, it should provide similar performance to what we’ve come to expect from Cortex-A9 chips such as the NVIDIA Tegra, Sasmung Exynos 4, or TI OMAP 4 line of processors.
But Cortex-A53 processors will use only 25 percent as much power as those chips. That could lead to significant battery life improvements in smartphones and tablets (although screen, wireless radios, and other components will continue to suck power).

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Rumor suggests the Galaxy S IV will use Exynos 5450 chipset

The new Samsung-made Nexus 10 uses the next-generation Exynos chipset - an Exynos 5 with two Cortex-A15 cores at 1.7GHz and Mali-604 GPU (the same chipset as the new Chromebook).

So, rumors that the next Samsung Galaxy S IV will use an Exynos 5 chipset should come as no surprise, but the rumor is dreaming bigger than we would have thought. It points to the Exynos 5450 - with a quad-core A15 processor, clocked at 2GHz and a beefier Mali-658 GPU.

We already saw early benchmarks of the 604 (which is a quad-core GPU), so the 658 should be wipe the floor with current GPUs (it's an octa-core GPU). We have yet to see Cortex-A15 benchmarks but it should easily top Krait's per-core performance.

Now, there's a bit of a problem - power usage. With four Cortex-A15 cores and eight GPU cores, even a big battery would be drained pretty quickly. The Exynos 5450 will be made on a 28nm process (instead of 32nm as the Exynos 5250) and the CPU will probably be downclocked to at least 1.7GHz, but even then battery might be an issue.

Anyway, we wouldn't be surprised to see an Exynos 5250 inside next year's Galaxy S flagship, but the 5450 - as awesome as it would be - might be be too much to ask so don't get your hopes too high.

Source (in Korean) | Via

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Eight-Core ARM GPUs Could Bring Console-Class Graphics to Your Smartphone

Right now, ARM graphics aren't exactly bad. The Samsung's Galaxy SIII with its quad-core Mali 400 GPU leads the pack in mobile prettiness, but the upcoming ARM GPUs, scalable to eight-cores, could blow it out of the water.

While we're still waiting on the next generation of Mali chips which includes the T604 and the T658, ARM is already teasing three more upcoming models: a quad-core T624, and the eight-core scalable T628 and T678. OK, but how much better are these babies going to be? Fifty percent, without needing more power. According to ARM, they're shooting to handle "console-class gaming," 4K and 8K videos, and the ability to jack up the UI of phones and tablets to a nice 60fps. Sure, the Tegra 3 GPU is already scalable to 12 core, but ARM is pretty ubiquitous.

On top of all that, ARM's also making a bid to try and standardize mobile graphics with a brand new codec: Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC). According to ARM, ASTC will be able to handle all kinds of different bit-rates, color standards, and textures. If it works as well as ARM hopes, this should mean that developers would stop having to make explicit codec decisions based on platform, which would make it that much easier to have apps be multi-platform.

Exciting as that all is, there's no word on when we can expect to start seeing these things. But if they can manage to live up to the hype, the answer is "not soon enough." [Engadget]

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