ARM has a problem – Cortex-A9 is old and the new Cortex-A15 cores just can't seem to make it to the market (the Exynos 5 Octa and Tegra 4 both have issues getting on shipping devices). The company just announced an interim solution, the Cortex-A12.
It offers a 40% performance increase over the A9 and should bring some power saving to the table too. It supports big.LITTLE configurations so it can be paired with Cortex-A7 to improve power efficiency even further (whether it will work or not is another matter, the A15/A7 pairing doesn’t do too well).
ARM's GPU line is in a similar spot – the new Mali-600 series really only shipped on the Google Nexus 10, most current chipsets rely either on a PowerVR GPU or an Adreno. So, here comes the Mali-622, a mid-range GPU to go with Cortex-A12.
It's an OpenGL ES 3.0, DirectX 11 and OpenCL 1.1 enabled GPU that promises 50% power-saving over the 604.
A new video core was also introduced, the Mali-V500 can encode 1080p video at 60fps and decode 4K at 120fps given enough cores.
Devices using the new generation mid-range chipsets using the Cortex-A12 and Mali-622 are expected in mid-2014.
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