ARM has deployed a next-gen Cortex-A15 MPCore processor that is capable of running at speeds of up to 2.5GHz in certain configurations.
The supercharged chip is expected to usher in a new generation of smartphones, tablets, large-screen MIDs and cloud computing infrastructure.
Indeed, the Cortex-A15 extends the current capabilities of the ARM Cortex-A series with optimized support for OS virtualization, soft-error recovery, larger memory addressability and system coherency.
The processor also boasts an out-of-order superscalar pipeline with a tightly-coupled low-latency level-2 cache that can scale up to 4MB in size.
Other features include improvements in floating point and NEON media performance, efficient handling of complex software environments, Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE) – addressing up to 1TB of memory, and error correction capability for fault-tolerance/soft-fault recovery.
As expected, the Cortex-A15 is fully compatible with numerous popular operating systems and platforms, such as Android, Adobe Flash, Java, JavaFX, Linux, Microsoft Windows EC 7, Symbian and Ubuntu.
However, it should be noted that the smartphone/tablet iteration of the Cortex-A15 is currently limited to a 1 GHz – 1.5 GHz single or dual-core configuration.
Nevertheless, digital home entertainment devices equipped with the A15 will support 1 GHz – 2 GHz dual-core or quad-core configurations, while chips slated for Home and Web 2.0 Servers are expected to be available in 1.5GHz-2.5 GHz quad-core versions.
