14 DAY TRIAL // Smartphones are bound to get increasingly more powerful and efficient, to a point that someday they might even completely replace good old computers.
British silicone producer ARM, whose designs can be found almost in every handset on the market today, certainly believes this is a great possibility.
The company has just unveiled a couple of new designs that are expected to make it out into products in 2016. The Cortex A-72 processor and Mali T-880 will reportedly allow smartphone makers to build devices that enjoy longer battery life and are a lot thinner.
Smartphones in 2016 have a big challenge ahead
So if a 4.7mm / 0.18 inches phone isn't enough or sleek enough for you, just wait until 2016 comes. But the new chips also hold another interesting promise at their core.
ARM sees smartphones of 2016 taking over operations which were traditionally bound to the PC, like content creation, intensive writing, editing video or producing music, as mentioned by CNET.
The chip maker believes that smartphones of the future can be created sufficient enough to be able to handle anything in any situation, thus leaving out the need for a PC device.
ARM and its partners like Microsoft, Sprint or Facebook all believe in the need to make mobile devices even stronger. And this is the way things are evolving towards.
Let’s take the Oculus, which was originally developed as VR technology for PCs. But with the Samsung Gear VR, things took a turn for the mobile side of things. The gizmo uses a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphone to produce the viewing experience, but it’s currently not near being perfect. But ARM can help perfect things.
What are the new chips all about?
Now, for a bit of technicalities regarding the new chips released by ARM. The Cortex A-72 processor is advertised as being 50 times more powerful compared to what was available five years ago. And compared to 2014’s CPUs, it consumes 75% less energy.
ARM promises extended performance and efficiency when the Cortex-A72 CPU is found in combination with a Cortex-A53 CPU in ARM big.LITTLE setups.
The chip maker also says it has signed licensing deals for the new chip which is based on the ARMv8-A architecture with more than ten partners, including Huawei (for HiSilicone), MediaTek and Rockchip.
The Mali T-880 GPU, on the other hand, is also said to bring an important boost compared to last year’s standard. We should also expect mobile devices supporting the GPU to be capable of sustaining more demanding games and software. Native support for 10-bit YUV for viewing premium 4K content can be found onboard.
Both pieces of silicone are manufactured using 16nm processes.
