Arm saves battery life with new multicore design

Arm's new Cortex A9-MPCore design for a cellular processor with up to four cores aims to deliver better performance to smartphones and mobile devices while consuming minimal battery life.

The multicore architecture was announced Wednesday at the Arm Developers' Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Arm also announced the Cortex A9 single-core processor.

Using the core and development tools provided with it, licensees can customize the power consumption level while scaling applications to peak performance, said John Goodacre, program manager at Arm, based in Cambridge, U.K. For example, a media player can be designed to deliver the best graphics performance while consuming minimal power, Goodacre said.

This is also Arm's first core where licensees can scale to 8000 DMIPS (Dhrystone Million Instructions Per Second) of CPU performance to deliver a rich application experience, Goodacre said. Arm delivered 2000 DMIPS of CPU performance in its Cortex-A8 cellular processor, which the company launched in 2005, and top-level smartphones today use less than 2000 DMIPS, Goodacre said.

Texas Instruments, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, and NEC Electronics have licensed the new processor architecture already, Arm said.