ARM, the chip design licensing company, announced that its newest applications processor is the Cortex-A35, which it called the chip for the “next billion smartphone users”.
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Nandam Nayampally, vp of marketing for ARM’s CPU group, said v8-M is a 32bit architecture which will run the T32/Thumb instruction sets and bring TrustZone levels of security to the M class for the first time. The next stage for ARM is to target what is now the feature phone market with the Cortex-A35. However it only uses less than 90mW total power per core, when operating 1GHz in a 28nn process node. This is achieved with ARM TrustZone technology, now available as a feature within the latest ARMv8-M architecture being launched today at ARM TechCon 2015. The biggest takeaway is that ARM is targeting a much broader market for its technology.
Ian Smythe, director of marketing programs at ARM’s CPU Group, said in a press briefing that the Cortex-A35 is an ultra-power-efficient 64-bit processor that is targeted at entry-level smartphones. It is capable of buddying up with the full range of other 64-bit cores, the A53, A57 and A72, so we can expect chipset designers to implement a big.LITTLE processor based around the A35 with either the A53 or A72 (the A57 is less likely to be used as it is an older and less efficient design than the A72).
Maintaining big.LITTLE configurability and supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit compute capabilities, the Cortex-A35 core is typically 25 per cent smaller than a Cortex-A53 and consumes up to 33 per cent less power, making it a tailored fit for the next generation of low-priced devices. The new design is based on ARMv8-A, 64-bit architecture and should offer up to 20 percent better performance while consuming around 10 percent less power than a Cortex-A7 chip.
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Most people in rich countries who want a smartphone already have one, so growth at the high-end of the market has been cooling off a bit. However, there is demand for more choices around everything from price to power efficiency to cost, and ARM and OEMs need to address that demand.
