Chip designers ARM has announced today at Computex 2013 three new chips to power future smart devices: the Cortex A12 processing chip, the Mali-T622 graphics chip and Mali-V500 video encoding/decoding chip.
The new Cortex-A12 chip, interestingly, isn’t designed for the superphones of tomorrow. Instead, it is aimed at replacing the aging Cortex-A9 architecture, and at the same time boosting performance. According to ARM, the new A12 chips offers 40% better performance over the A9. And, intriguingly, they will also play nice with the company’s big.LITTLE configuration, allowing it to be paired with the power-efficient Cortex-A7 chips, and the system intelligently selects the optimum chips depending on use.
The Mali-T622 chip, on the other hand, is a graphics processing chip that ARM claims is 50% more power efficient that previous Mali chips. It is also Open CL 1.1 compliant, allowing it to handle tasks that the CPU would have in the past. It also supports OpenGL ES 3.0 for 3D applications.
Finally, the Mali-V500 video encoding/decoding chip uses TrustZone technology, which helps with content protection from piracy. Also, if there is enough processing power, the Mali-V500 can even handle 4K videos at up to 120fps.
With penetration for smart devices increasing at an unprecedented pace, ARM believes that demand for mid-range devices will soon pick up dramatically – hence the introduction of the Cortex-A12 and Mali-T622 chips. However, ARM has stated that devices running on these new chips may only make their debuts sometime next year.
(Image Source: Tech2)
