The British maker of SoCs ARM has presented a new Cortex core at the on-going ARM TechCon event with the core being called Cortex-A35. The chip is ARM’s currently most energy efficient design and is designed for use in wearables, smartwatches and other similar devices.
The Cortex-A35 is a 64-bit low power variant of the ARMv8 architecture and has come here to replace the earlier A7 and A5 cores and not the current A53 design. Compared to the A53 design, however, the A35 comes with a core that is 25 per cent smaller, has 32 per cent lower energy usage and is 25 per cent more efficient. The A35 is made using 28 nm tech process and needs just 90 mW of power when running at 1 GHz but die shrinks to 16 nm or even 14 nm will allow the core to run at 2 GHz or even higher. The chip supports ARM’s A72/A57/A53 cores and allows for the creation of new big.LITTLE cores that may look really interesting.
Internally the A35 features dual-issue in-order architecture that has 8-stage execution pipelines but as a whole the new core does not include major architectural changes except for improved individual blocks for better performance and efficiency. The core has a redesigned instruction fetch unit, improved branch prediction and a more efficient instruction queue.
The first Cortex-A35 cores will be available by the end of year 2016 and apart from smartwatches may also serve in some entry-level smartphones.
Source: Nextpowerup.com