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.

ARM Cortex-A57

The new chips designs are the first to be based on ARMv8 architecture, and feature 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).

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,545 other subscribers

4 replies on “ARM Cortex-A50 chips coming in 2014, bringing higher performance, lower power consumption”

  1. Hey AMD, partner this up with a Radeon GPU and package it as a mini-itx board!

    1. AMD revealed the other day that in 2014 they would begin production of their first ARMv8 based 64-bit Opteron CPUs, which explains their acquisition of SeaMicro’s Freedom Fabric.

      Time table may be too optimistic though, move to Cortex A15 and 28nm had delays to the point we won’t see many until next year that were originally due out this year.

      Actual time table is to introduce the Silicon either late 2013 or early 2014 and then 6-12 months later have production… So even assuming no delays it’ll be late 2014 before we can expect to see anything and not till 2015 if they run into any delays.

      While keep in mind AMD is applying this to the server market and not the general consumer market.

      We’ll have to wait and see if anyone brings this to the general consumer market or whether it’ll be only server market for now…

Comments are closed.