Throughout this week at CES 2013, quite a number of manufacturers such as NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Samsung have unveiled several new line-ups of SoC processors which will be powering new mobile devices that might appear in the market throughout this year. The folks at ST-Ericsson are part of the movement as well, through the announcement of its new NovaThor L8580 processor.

The new NovaThor L8580 SoC processor is equipped with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU which runs at up to 2.5GHz while the graphics section is handled by a 600MHz PowerVR SGX 544 GPU. The processor also has the ability to run in low-power mode which takes only 0.6V of power while still able to deliver computational performances of up to 5000 DMIPS. Built with the support for dual LP-DDR2 memories, the processor is also equipped with dual multimedia DSP and a multi-mode LTE modem that supports up to 10 LTE/WCDMA/GSM bands.

ST-Ericsson NovaThor L8580′s block diagram.

Furthermore, the L8580 supports display with resolution of up to 1920×1200 in single display mode and 960×540 when hooked to two displays. It also supports two camera with resolution of up to 20-megapixels (primary camera) and 5-megapixels (secondary cameras). Last but not least, the L8580 is also able to support 1080p video playback.

Since its CPU is based on older Cortex-A9 architecture as opposed to the new Cortex-A15, expect NovaThor L8580 chipset to pop up in mid-range devices. The customer sampling for the new chipset is scheduled to take place sometime in the first quarter of 2013, so consumers should to be able to see products powered by it in the market soon enough.

[Source: ST-Ericsson]