ARM Debuts Cortex A12 Chip For Midrange Device Market

ARM revealed the latest Cortex A12 processor designed for the mid range device market along with a new graphic processor and video coding engine at Comuptex, Sunday, June 2.

The British chip designer ARM announced an addition to its Cortex processors with the latest Cortex A12, designed for midrange tablets and the smartphone market. After the huge success of ARM's Cortex A15 as a part of the company's big.LITTLE architecture, the chip designer has unveiled Cortex A12, a new graphic processor and video coding engine at Computex.

ARM's Cortex A15 made its way into the Nexus 10 tablet and also partly in some of Samsung's Galaxy S4 smartphones. Now, the A12 processor replaces the widely popular Cortex A9 chip.

ARM Cortex A12 promises 40 percent better performance than its predecessor, Cortex A9. ARM aims to bring features such as larger screen sizes, good display resolution, higher battery capacity, better camera quality, more storage and main memory to the mid-range smartphones. The latest Cortex A12 will be distributed to the main partners in July and is likely to be used in mobile devices by mid-2014, according to a report from Venture Beat.

ARM also aims at the use of Cortex A12 processor into wearable devices such as smart watches. "Wearable and interneted devices are starting to come into the industry," ARM marketing executive vice president Ian Drew told Reuters in an interview ahead of the Computex show fair in Taipei. "I was riding a bike with a motion detector, and we've demonstrated a fork that has ARM control in it to count calorie consumption ... I suspect sometime this year you'll see one or two (manufacturers) demonstrate smart watches."

ARM faces stiff competition from the world's largest chip maker, Intel. The U.S. based company had revealed last month its refurbished Atom mobile processor targeting smartphones and tablets, widely used in mid-range devices.

In addition, ARM also unveiled the Mali-T622 GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) meant not only for use in smartphones and tablets but also in set top boxes, video-playing devices and other home entertainment devices. According to ARM, the Mali GPU will be small and 50 percent more energy efficient than the other Mali- T600 series GPUs. The Mali GPU will compete against major companies like Nvidia, Qualcomm and Apple too, which is currently working toward making its own GPUs.

In the midst of a range of new processors, ARM also announced a video encode/decode chip, Mali V500, which is designed to prevent piracy of 1080p class video. According to the Financial Times, ARM has contacted Hollywood Studios and distributors like Netflix to help avoid piracy of videos while being streamed and decoded on a mobile device.

Jeff Chu, director of segment marketing and client computing at ARM, in an interview with Venture Beat, said that more than 580 million mid-range devices will be sold every year by 2015. The mid-range smartphones will be priced around $200 to $350 and will see a high demand.