ARM confirms 2.5GHz speeds for its next generation quad-core Eagle chipsets

ARM unveiled more info about its upcoming quad-core Eagle chipset, now officially named Cortex-A15. Considering Cortex-A9 will appear in handsets probably next year, this is quite a leap forward. Eagle will feature five times the performance of current smartphone chipsets, with reduced energy consumption.

Texas Instruments is the first that licensed the new architecture, and is already promising a 60% reduction in power requirements in the OMAP chipsets based on Cortex-A15. These, of course, won't enter devices at least until 2013, but just the thought of five times the speed with double the battery life of existing smartphones will keep us warm until then. Other partners that worked with ARM on the Eagle developments have been Samsung and ST-Ericsson, so we will surely be seeing the chipset in Samsung, and maybe Nokia devices, when the time comes.

Cortex-A15 can reach 2.5GHz with its four cores variant, but these will be mainly for cloud servers and wireless towers; smartphones and tablets will receive the power-sipping 1-1.5GHz iteration on one or two cores. ARM also stated that Eagle will be backwards compatible with the existing ARM architecture, so all current mobile operating systems and applications should be running with ease on the new hardware.

Additional goodies include hardware-based virtualization, which might mean Android and Windows Phone 7 in one and the same handset, or carriers easily porting different operating system to the same hardware. Cortex-A15 can be produced with the 32nm/28nm, and even 20nm processes further down the road, meaning even faster chipsets with better power consumption. All in all, exciting times are ahead.

source: SlashGear