ARM, the British company behind most of the processors in your mobile phones, announced the Cortex-A12 line of CPUs alongside a new Mali-based GPU, intended for mid-range device consumption in late 2014.
Whereas Cortex-A15 was the successor to the high-end A9 series, Cortex-A12 finds a middle ground between low- and high-end architectures. ARM is offering a 40% increase in performance over existing A9 silicon with the same efficiency outputs and, like the A15 infrastructure, it can be combined with low-power A7 chips in a big.LITTLE configuration.
The understanding here is that Cortex-A15 and its successor A57 will power high-end devices with larger power requirements going into late 2014 early 2015, while Cortex-A12 and the Mali-T622 GPU will hit the mid-range market — the equivalents of the Snapdragon 400 and 600 CPUs today — optimized for battery life and cost.
Mali-T622 supports GPU processor offloading and OpenGL ES 3.0 for 3D apps and games, and 4K output is supported for compatible displays. While these specs may not be something to get too excited about, they’ll bring high-performance devices down to a manageable cost — say $200-250 — by the end of 2014.
Source: Anandtech
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