ARM touts performance gains of Cortex A50 chips

ARM has finalised the design of its Cortex-A50 series chipsets and expects partners such as AMD and Samsung launching devices in 2014.

Version 8(v8) of the popular Cortex series will initially have two designs available, which will be run on 64-bit architecture.

The Cortex-A57 is the flagship design and dual-core variants are expected to deliver a minimum 3x performance increase over today's devices, whilst consuming the same amount of power, explained Noel Vice President Marketing & Strategy, Processor Division.

Meanwhile, the A53 is set to be four times more power efficient than equivalent processors today.

Hurley was keen to emphasise that the all 32-bit applications will be supported, as the transition to 64-bit ecosystem will take time.

Security will also be boosted to make ARM devices more attraction to enterprises.

"There are specific parts of our architecture and cores that will address security, particularly improving encryption/decryption which will have a 10 times performance improvement."

In terms of configurations ARM envisages chip makers to combine the A53 and A57 chips what it dubs as big.LITTLE configurations.

Mid-range smartphones are expected to pack dual/quad-core A53 variants.

High-end phones and tablet are expected to ship with dual-core A57 chips alongside A53s.

Laptops, meanwhile, will have quad-core A57 together with A53 and the servers will support arrays comprising - 8, 16 and 24 cores.

As well as improving performance and power efficiency, ARM also helps to reduce cost as the A50 series is expected to be can be manufactured using the 20nm process and below.

High-profile partners such as Samsung have already signed up to use the design and smartphones are expected to be launched in 2014/15. AMD has has also teamed with ARM as the chip maker looks to differentiate itself from Intel by focusing on the server market.

Although the Cortex A50 series is expected to be popular in the mobile and tablet space, the server space generally requires big cores running at max performance, so penetrating this market will be difficult.