ARM unveils new chip design; promises console-level graphics

ARM has unveiled a new chip design, based on a 16nm manufacturing process that promises even better performance, console-like graphics and severely reduced energy consumption for longer battery life.

Vlad Dudau News Editor Neowin @avladd · Feb 4, 2015 07:56 EST · Hot! with 23 comments

MediaTek is one of ARM's partners for the new chips

Yesterday ARM unveiled their upcoming reference chips and based on their comments future gadgets will be insanely powerful.

In case you’re not familiar ARM is the company that designs the chips that power most of our gadgets so when they put out a new reference chip it’s a pretty big deal. That’s why we were pretty excited to see what the company has been working on.

ARM unveiled the new Cortex A72 chip alongside a new GPU, the Mali T880, to go along with it. The new chip offers some really impressive performance boosts compared to current models. In fact the A72 is said to be twice as powerful as the A57 and 3.5 more powerful than the A15.

But what’s really impressive about the new chip is its efficiency and power consumption. Designed to be used in conjunction with the Mali T880 and in an big.LITTLE configuration the SoC based on this design is expected to deliver console level graphics while reducing power consumption by 75% compared to last year’s model.

We know this sounds exciting but, unfortunately, those of you interested will have to wait. The first chips based on the A72 aren’t expected to reach devices until 2016, and even then it might still be a while before they’re used in popular devices.

Image via AllThingsD