New ARM chips headed for iPhone, Palm Pre?

ARM,
the company that designs chips for the world's smartphones, said
handset makers will deliver the first models using more than one
processor core next year, as high-end mobile phones begin to mimic the
hardware attributes of PCs.





And that means top smartphone suppliers such as Apple and Palm,
which both use ARM-based processors, will likely deliver models packing
at least two cores inside the main processor--referred to as an
application (or applications) processor.



This is a natural progression for high-end smartphones like the
iPhone and Palm Pre as the software those phones run gets increasingly
sophisticated.



"You'll definitely see handsets shipping with a dual-core A9 in
2010," James Bruce, wireless segment manager for ARM, said in a phone
interview earlier this week, referring to the next-generation Cortex-A9
processor from ARM.



The Palm Pre uses a processor based on the current-generation Cortex
A8. The iPhone
also uses an Apple-branded chip that is based on an ARM
design.



"The A8 is just a single core while the A9 will be dual-core, all
the way up to quad-core to give smartphones an even bigger performance
boost," Bruce said.



He said the m
ove to dual-core phones should happen relatively
quickly. "It's very aggressive. It's only going to be in a year's time
that you're going to get these phones," he said.



And what about power consumption, a critical concern for smartphones
looking to deliver all-day battery life? "What we've done on the A9 is
actually make it more power efficient than the A8. The dual-core A9
will be coming out on 45-nanometer rather than the (current)
65-nanometer process," Bruce said. Generally, the smaller the
geometries, the
faster and more power-efficient the processor is.



Bruce continued. "With the dual-core running at maximum load there's
probably going to be an increase of about 10 to 20 percent in power
consumption but in general day to day use you're actually going to see
better battery life."

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Originally posted at Nanotech - The Circuits Blog