In the mind boggling large mobile market a lot of time is spent talking about the smartphones which represent less than 20% of the market today. It is a market which is in transition from ARM11 to Cortex-A8 processors and will move to dual core Cortex-A9 processors next year. These SoCs typically have a GPU such as a Mali400 for impressive user interfaces and accelerating Flash10.1 graphics and a video block for DVC functions that can push out to an HD display. There is a lot of software being optimised for these Cortex-A family cores (If you are a software engineer you will know this as our v7A architecture). Backwards compatibility comes as standard with these application processors, you can run code from an ARM7 or ARM9 core from 10 years ago. That’s great from a compatibility story, but as time moves on the architecture gets lots of useful features that software engineers want to make use of. There is a lot of v7A software optimisation being done for smartphones, think Web2.0, graphics, codecs, speech recognition etc that make use of things like NEON DSP capability or the latest Thumb-2 instruction set that designers of feature phones or low cost devices might like to make use of. At ARM we want to make our latest Cortex-A family processors available for every segment, not just the high end. We want to enable Cortex-A processors to be sold in billions of units to every segment of the market. To deliver on this vision we created Cortex-A5 an amazingly power efficient processor that is small enough to be usable in a low cost handset but with a performance beyond 90% of today’s smartphones. To make things interesting we also enable chip designers to go multi-core so designers and marketing teams can make fine grain choices on power, performance and area.

In a world that expects roadmaps to always go up and to the right, Cortex-A5 might seem surprising. It is the context of the amazingly complex and segmented mobile market place that makes this design so interesting. It is an exciting prospect for silicon partners for ARM to offer an Apps core with the best power efficiency, low silicon cost and application compatibility with its bigger brothers, Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9. So which sub-segments will Cortex-A5 be designed into – Low cost, Feature phone or Smartphone? The unexpected answer is all of them. Just as ARM11 won sockets simultaneously for low cost handsets and smartphones so will Cortex-A5. For premium devices with top end performance requirements OEMs will choose dual core Cortex-A9 or unicore Cortex-A8 based SoCs, but for everything else there is Cortex-A5. For a core which only measures a fraction of a square millimetre in a modern chip it is going to be a big industry event.

Rob Coombs, Director of Mobile Marketing, ARM, focuses on mobile gadgets that can fit in your pocket and is excited about the next wave of Smartphones that promise to be smarter and wow us with stunning graphics. This new class of Smartphone, which will focus on personal Internet and user experience, will change the industry and delight users. The ARM mobile marketing team are at the centre of the mobile industry and this provides a great place for Rob to look at the trends, and comment on the news that drives the industry and our business.

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