Arm Chips in 2014 will be 64-bit, 3X the Power
Smartphones continue their inevitable march forward. Over the last 5 years, phones have gone from anemic machines suitable only for the most basic of tasks to true powerhouses, with quad-core devices ripping through complicated 3D math with ease.
But for a look at what's coming next, you need to look at the new components coming out in the near future. And in this case, ARM has some pretty spectacular things coming out.
Today the company revealed the Cortex-A50 line of processors, consisting of the Cortex-A57, which has "up to three times that of today’s superphones in the same power budget," and the Cortex-A53, designed to "today's superphone experience while using a quarter of the power." Basically, a power-sipping model, and a powerhouse model. You might predict that the powerhouse model will be the far more significant of the two, but current trends are towards longer lasting devices. The Cortex-A53 has a clear advantage there. Or, the two could be used in companion mode, with the Cortex-A53 handling light computing tasks like running the operating system and the Cortex-A57 handling complicated things like running games.
The most interesting part is that both CPU's will be 64 bit processors, rather than the 32 bit ones we've seen up until now. In fact, the Cortex-A53 is apparently the smallest 64 bit processor in the world.
Of course, you shouldn't forget that ARM makes no processors themselves. They are a design company, a group that architects new processors and licenses their work out to others with the manufacturing experience to bring them to market. So far that model has been wildly successful for them, with ARM marketshare quickly climbing. These days, ARM devices are even threatening X86 processors like those manufactured by Intel and AMD.
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