ARM A9 Dual Core Arm Chipset Coming to Palm Soon

ARM the makers of smart phone chips said they will deliver the new chipset which contains more than one core, will be delivered in the next generation devices very soon. We are speculating that this could be in the next version of Palm's webOS handset and may soon also contain the same design for iPhone. Who will see the chipset in the first handset remains to be seen. But from Palm's aggressive strategy with Palm Pre and working with app developers which I met Friday night in San Francisco, Palm is certainly moving in the right direction, as their stock price had indicated.



"The A8 is just a single core while the A9 will be dual-core, all the way up to quad-core to give smartphones an even bigger performance boost," Bruce said.

He said the move to dual-core phones should happen relatively quickly. "It's very aggressive. It's only going to be in a year's time that you're going to get these phones," he said.

"You'll definitely see handsets shipping with a dual-core A9 in 2010," James Bruce, wireless segment manager for ARM, said in a phone interview earlier this week, referring to the next-generation Cortex-A9 processor from ARM.

"You're getting a 2X increase (over the previous ARM design). "And actually the A9 takes that even further, It's a superscalar design but it's also an out-of-order design as well. There is some out-of-order aspects with the A8 but the A9 is a very aggressive out-of-order processor," he said. The ability to process instructions using an advanced out-of-order architecture typically results in better performance.

And graphics will follow suit. The upcoming multi-core OMAP 4 processor from Texas Instruments (the OMAP 3 is used in the Palm Pre) is based on the ARM Cortex-9 and will boast graphics that support 1080p video and high-definition record and playback, larger screen resolutions, and "digital SLR-like performance with 20 MP (megapixel) imaging," according to TI documentation.

[Originally Posted at prethinking.com]