ARM Announces New Mid-Range Designs, MediaTek Already Has Chips Ready To Go

ARM technology powers the vast majority of mobile devices in the world, and the company has just announced some new designs to continue that tradition. The ARM Cortex-A17 is a new mid-range CPU core that offers improved speed and efficiency for budget devices. That's not all – there is also a new version of the Mali GPU for a complete price-conscious package.

 

The Cortex-A17 is not meant to replace the A15 – that's still the flagship CPU core design from ARM. The A17 is a mid-range part that should give chip makers a better option than continuing to use older A9s, the limited A12, or just a bunch of low-power Cortex-A7 cores. Cortex-A17 supports full-system coherency for ARM big.LITTLE with the CCI-400, which means it can operate alongside low-power cores like the A7. ARM licensees will also have the option to integrate the Mali-T720 GPU with this and other CPUs. The Mali-T720 GPU is a "cost-optimized" GPU that supports Open GL ES 3.0, OpenCL, and RenderScript.
This seems like a design that would be right up MediaTek's alley, and indeed the company has announced a chip that will use the A17. The MT6595 will be an eight-core chip – four A17s and four A7s. The A7 cores will the the LITTLE half of the big.LITTLE configuration, and the MT6595 will support Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP). That means all eight cores can operate at the same time. This system-on-a-chip will also have built-in LTE, which could be a big deal in mid-range phones and tablets.
ARM expects Cortex-A17 to be big in 2015, but MediaTek is going to start producing the MT6595 in the next few months, and is targeting devices for late 2014.