“ARM on Tuesday rolled out a unique variant on the Cortex-A15 designed to bring the next-generation chip to shelves faster and with less power use,” Electronista reports.
“A new hard macro variant that has fixed specifications, including quad cores clocked at 2GHz based on a 28 nanometer TSMC-made (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) design, instead of the ‘soft core’ that lets firms heavily customize an ARM design to their own ends,” Electronista reports. “In return, however, it’s both faster to implement and uses the same power as the earlier Cortex-A9.”
Electronista reports, “The gain is seen as a ‘balance of performance and power’ that could go so far as to power full notebooks and thin but fast network hardware.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Dan K.” and “Judge Bork” for the heads up.]
… Apple could get what might well be a “better” chip, and sooner, but wouldn’t benefit from their special code built in? And the competition could have the same chip the same day?
Sounds like a big “maybe” as to if this would be good for Apple.
This spells serious competition for Apple if not it definitely expresses that the competition has the power to use this and out muscle Apples A6.
Not unless Android is destroyed can Apple do a things about this. While Apple spreads its focus on OSX and iOS and chip design and store content – please realize Apples growth as APPLE INC is multi-directional and as a small company they will have to compete with more then an A6 and great look gin designs.
The iPhone had a 5 year lead… in 1 year Google was only 1 year behind them Samsung copied Apple as much as possible and proved to sell well… Siri gave Apple a 1 year head start to a new UI… but this advancement regarding the A15 could allow the competition to pass Apple.
New IPad – needed the A15 last month – to keep that Apple advantage. Now where is it Cook? In Retina displays? We will see.
Consumers will decide if it was worth it.
A rather pessimistic outlook, WaterLily. Time will tell…but I am not nearly as concerned as you seem to be.
Sorry WaterLily but you’re way off on market assessment. If you asked 10 random consumers what powers their smart phones, 9 would have no idea. Consumers don’t give a rat’s ass about CPU specs. All that matters in this day and age is usability and functionality.
Bring on them ARM (powered) Macs 🙂
Apple’s competition uses Intel chips. Apple designs its own ARM chips. Apple can probably take advantage of this better than anyone. 🙂
ARM is the return of the RISC chip, for those of us who were using PPC Macs. PPC and ARM are RISC and x86 is CISC.
Intels wafer baking skill will mean they remain the chip of choice for anything that is used within range of a power.socket. ARMs superior efficiency designs make them the choice when a power socket is not available. Competition is good. Innovation is good. Game on.
Apple designs both the software and the hardware, as long as Apple has the will to design better, any company doing only hardware or only software can’t catch up.
@DannoX
They don’t need to catch up, they just need to be good enough for the unwashed masses. Did you miss the last quarter century and companies such as Microsoft and Dell?