ARM details Cortex-A12: tomorrow's midrangers to decode 4K video at 120fps
The renowned chip architect announced today the ARM Cortex-A12 undertaking. It brings the big.LITTLE arrangement downmarket, and is done with 28nm process, as the current mobile finest. It also supports the enterprise-friendly Virtualization and TrustZone security technologies, and can address up to 1 TB of storage.
Cortex-A12 features 40% performance bump compared to the Cortex-A9s of last year, all within a very frugal power envelope with a new Mali-T622 graphics processor. It's "the smallest full profile GPU Compute solution available for mobile device", and, together with the new energy-efficient Mali-V500 video IP solution, forms a video encoding/decoding powerhouse for midrange devices.
What kind of a powerhouse? Well, let's just mention that it will allow 1080p video recording and playback from a single-core processor at 60fps, and 4K video with a multicore setup at up to 120fps. Not bad for phones that will be introduced as midrange in a year, when Cortex-A12 will enter devices.
source: ARM
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