Chip design company ARM, famous for its Cortex A-series of processors, today introduced a new low-power design of its quad-core Cortex-A15 chip. Its main purpose is to help system-on-a-chip manufacturers design their products faster and with lower power use.
This will be achieved using the company's new hard macrocell implementations of the Cortex A-series of processors. Those versions will boast four cores clocked at 2GHz based on a 28nm design that have fixed specifications. This means that companies using those "hard macro" implementations will not be able to heavily customize ARM's design to their liking.
As a result, manufacturers will get the same power usage as earlier Cortex-A9 chips and faster turnaround times for their SoCs, since they won't be able to fiddle with them. ARM says this will bring "balance of performance and power", which could eventually be used even in notebooks or fast network devices such as smart routers.
ARM is expected to reveal more details on their new work at tomorrow's IEEE symposium in Yokohama. Chips are expected to start shipping as early as the end of 2012.
It's not yet clear how this would reflect on various manufacturers, but it's certainly going to give them the option to quickly utilize the Cortex-A15 processor, without spending too much time on its development to suite their own needs.
