ARM multicore chip challenges Intel’s hegemony

Microprocessor design company ARM said it has introduced the Cortex A5 MPCore CPU, a low power chip designed to make the internet available on a wide range of devices.

The processor supports four multicores and is aimed at ultra low cost handsets, phones, smartphones.

The design uses ARM MPCore technology, already licensed by Broadcom, NEC, Nvidia, Renesas and Toshiba.

It supports Android, Adobe Flash, JAVA SE, Java FX, Linux, MS Windows Embedded, Symbian and Ubuntu.

Nathan Brookwood, senior analyst at Insight 64, said: “The performance of the Cortex A5 processor, when combined with Adobe’s recently announced support for Cortex-A profile processors in Flash Player 10.1, will allow users of ARM processor based systems to view the same internet video content previously accessible only to users of X86 based systems.”

Samsung endorsed the introduction and said it used many ARM CPU cores in its system on a chip products.