ARM Launches New Chip For Smartphones, Netbooks

ARM has unveiled its smallest, most energy-efficient processor design with its Cortex-A5 chip, that targets smaller, Internet-connected devices such as smartphones, netbooks and embedded systems.

ARM is main supplier of chips used in smartphones and other small devices. However, the UK chip maker is facing an aggressive push into the mobile space from chip giant Intel, with its Atom platform.

ARM unveiled the new design at its ARM TechCon3 event in Santa Clara, California. The new Cortex-A5 MPCore processor will be cheaper, faster and more energy efficient than its predecessors.

ARM can be licensed immediately and will be delivered to its hundreds of manufacturing partners, such as Samsung Electronics, later this year. The company expects devices with the Cortex-A5 processor to become available in 2011, according to Travis Lanier, product development manager for the Cortex-A5.

The new processor comes as Intel looks to move deeper into the mobile device space with its Atom processor. At their Intel Developer Forum in September, company officials said Intel is working on a 32-nanometer version of Atom, which will offer better leakage control than the current version and will rival what ARM can offer now. Intel also created a developer program aimed at expanding the market reach of the Atom platform.

Lanier noted that the Cortex-A5 is a much smaller and more powerful offering than Atom, and said that Intel will have to reach the 15-nm manufacturing process for Atom before the chip can offer the same cost efficiency as the Corex-A5.

“For the mass market, they’re a long way off,” he said in an interview.

ARM’s new chip comes with one to four processors, at speeds of up to 1GHz. The cores in the Cortex-A5 will be able to run up to three times faster than those in the ARM 9, the eight-year-old product which is the company’s current chip for the low-end market.

The Cortex-A5 will refresh the ARM 9, which gave users basic Internet connectivity, Lanier said. More than 5 billion ARM 9 units have been shipped, he said.

The Cortex-A5 will include ARM’s TrustZone security technology and a Neon multimedia processing engine, which was first introduced with the Cortex-A8 processor design. The Neon technology is designed to offer enhanced acceleration for multimedia applications.

The Cortex-A5 also is compatible with the Cortex-A8 and A9 chips, which means immediate support from developers using Android, Adobe Flash, Java Platform Standard Edition, JavaFX, Linux, Microsoft Windows Embedded, Symbian and Ubuntu.

The chip is designed to work with a wide range of Internet-enabled devices, from smartphones and netbooks to embedded consumer and industrial systems.

“There’s a very massive opportunity here,” Lanier said.