ARM unwraps its most powerful mobile chip yet, headed for phones and tablets next year

From InfoWorld: The company that powers your smartphones and tablets has introduced its most powerful chip design yet, the Cortex-A72, which should find its way into gadgets early next year.

ARM says the A72 will provide 3.5 times the performance of its current Cortex-A15 design, which is widely used in phones and tablets today.

ARM doesn't make chips itself. It comes up with designs that it licenses to others for manufacture. Those designs dominate the smartphone and tablet markets, though Samsung is also a big player and Intel is doing its best to catch up.

The A72 will help to enable continued improvements in areas like mobile gaming, voice control and video streaming, including 4K 120-frame-per-second video streaming on the go, ARM says.

One reason ARM's CPU designs have been so successful is because they consume very little power, which is vital for mobile gadgets. Batteries haven't advanced much in the last five years, but CPU performance has increased by leaps and bounds, in part because of new designs like the one launched Tuesday.

The new chip will run at up to 2.5GHz in smartphones and up to 3.5GHz in tablets, ARM said.

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