Following on from Samsung reveal of its dual Cortex A9 processor, codenamed Orion, ARM itself has announced a new processor.

It reckons the Cortex-A15 MPCore will delivers five times the performance of today's smartphone processors, within a comparable energy footprint.

ARM expects it will be used in smartphones, tablets, large screen mobile computing and high-end digital home entertainment devices.

The Cortex-A15 MPCore processor, which can feature one to four cores in a single processor unit, has an out-of-order superscalar pipeline with a tightly coupled low latency level-2 cache of up to 4MB in size.

Now available for licensing, the Cortex-A15 MPCore runs at up to 2.5GHz and is targeted initially at 32nm and 28nm fabrication technologies with a roadmap extending to 20nm.

Off a shiny shovel

"The launch of the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor marks the beginning of an entirely new era for the ARM Partnership," said Mike Inglis, EVP and GM, Processor Division, ARM.

"It brings together more than 20 years of ARM expertise in low-power design with a host of new and very aggressive high-performance technologies.

"The Cortex-A15 MPCore processor will become the next major step along the industry's energy efficient computing roadmap and open up a wide range of new application possibilities for our Partners."

The Cortex-A15 enjoys full application compatibility with the other Cortex-A range, enabling use with technologies such as Android, Adobe Flash Player, Java Platform Standard Edition, JavaFX, Linux, Microsoft Windows Embedded Compact 7, Symbian and Ubuntu.

[source: ARM]