With 4K video creeping steadily onto TVs and computers, it’s next big target would be mobile phones if ARM has any say about it.
Having just unveiled their Cortex-A72 mobile processor reference design, the new chip promises to give a huge boost to graphics and general processing your mobile. The updates to the chip includes optimizations for 30 percent more memory performance and up to 80 percent speedier graphics, roughly makes it about 3.5 times more powerful than it’s ancestor the Cortex-A15 chip. It would also be capable of recording 4K video at 120 frames per second, which is a huge improvement over the 30 frames that most smartphones are only capable of.
On top of that, the processor will also consume about 75 percent less power than it’s predecessor the A15 at a similar level of performance, with graphics only needing about 40 percent less than what it was used to.
The Cortex-A72 is understandably built to take full advantage of ARM’s big.LITTLE tech that switches CPU cores depending on your mobile’s workload as well as 64-bit platforms like Android’s Lollipop OS. So it’s fully possible that mobiles possessing this chip will likely have longer battery life as well as be immensely good at handling gaming.
Huawei (HiSilicon), MediaTek and Rockchip have already signed up to make A72-based processors so you can something out of this soon but ARM isn’t expecting to ship the hardware till sometime in 2016.
