As shoppers in central London tried to browse the web on their smartphones this evening, in a room nearby the head of a UK company was describing processor technology which in two years will make their phones run like PCs.
The company is ARM and its low power processors will be, not may be, making smartphones run web-based applications like PCs within two years.
This level of performance may also be seen in pay-as-you-go phones costing less than £70.
“Applications on smartphones today will simply run on a smartphone in 2013, but very much more power efficiently,” said Warren East, CEO of ARM.
The Cambridge-based company is aiming to put clear blue water between it and its big rival, Intel in terms of processor power efficiency.
To do this it is introducing processor partitioning at a level it has not attempted to do before. To be implemented in chips at the 28nm process node.
It can do this because it has two processor cores, the Cortex –A15 MPCore, introduced last year, and the newly announced Cortex-A7 MPCore which have the same level one and two cache implementations and interrupt structures.
As a result processing tasks can be switched from the lower performance, but more power efficient, A7 core to the higher performance A15 within 20µs using a coherent interconnect fabric, called CCI-400.
“The mobile OS will not know, does not need to know, which processor is being used for specific tasks,” said East.
He then demonstrated the processor partitioning technology, which ARM has dubbed big.LITTLE processing, running an unmodified Android OS on Cortex-A7 and A15 cores.
So important is this level of processor partitioning in lowering the power consumption in processing intensive web-based applications in smartphones and tablet PCs, that ARM is likely to implement it on all future CPU cores and even its Mali graphics processors.
“It is a new way of making microprocessors work together and it takes ARM forward in terms of efficiency of power consumption,” said East.
The first smartphones with applications processor implementing the new technology are expected to be on the market in 2013.
www.arm.com
