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ARM announces Cortex A7 processor

by on20 October 2011



28nm part for entry level smartphones


There’s been much talk of high performance ARM cores in recent months, mainly thanks to the tablet and superphone hype, but ARM is not forgetting other market segments.

The British chip designer has announced the Coretex ARM A7 MPCore, a tiny processor aimed at entry level smartphones and similar devices. Although dual-cores and upcoming quad-core chips will be talk of the town for months to come, the A7 is a pretty interesting chip and we have no doubt it will power quite a few mainstream phones in the future.

The A7 is a 28nm chip and ARM claims it is the most power efficient chip it has ever developed. The design can be implemented in single-core and multi-core flavors. Thanks to the new production process, the A7 should deliver adequate performance coupled with good battery life.

ARM believes the A7 will allow phone makers to come up with compact, sub-$100 smartphones aimed at emerging markets and in terms of performance it should match current high end phones. However, the first value smartphones based on the new chip won’t be available before 2013, just in time for the economy to fail and make cheap phones more appealing in developed markets as well.

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