Next Generation of ARM cores are interesting indeed

Sources:
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/04/20/arm_cortex_a15/
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a15.php

Pretty exciting news that the next generation of the of ARM cpus (A15) to arrive in early 2013 are being touted as having up to 16 cores, clock speeds of up to 2.5 GHz whilst using a similar amount of power as the current A9s (based in part on new fabrication techniques).





It is still a ARMv7-A Cortex architecture so hopefully all the software developed for the BeagleBoard and PandaBoards will happily exist on this new beast. So we are still dealing with a 32 bit processor with 40-bit memory address space.

Your current Pandaboard ships with a dual core A9 running at 1Ghz and this author is hoping since the codename is Eagle for the A15 will will see an "EagleBoard" or similar in late 2012 from TI. Maybe a "GrizzlyBoard" would better capture the grunt on offer.

TI has announced the OMAP 5 will use the A15s.  Here is a great little summary of the capability:




I'm excited to see devices like the Asus EeePad Transformer take advantage of the A15's features:
http://www.asus.com/Eee/Eee_Pad/Eee_Pad_Transformer_TF101/



Obviously this is powered by NVidia not TI but I think this type of device will earn its place at the table.

Given the multiple core capability of the A9 and A15s, the Jazelle RCT extensions and the OpenGL ES 2.0 hardware TI love to leverage in the ARM space, we are seeing hardware really play to Android 2.3+ strengths.

The future looks so bright I am going to need shades.

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