Moore’s Law due for a reboot on Mobile devices?
By Ben Robinson on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 1:30 PM PST In Research, The Digital Life
BBC News has a great story on where the development of Mobile device chipsets is going to be going in the coming months – very simply, to a multi-core architecture.
The article features commentary from Advanced Risc Machines (Arm), a UK-based firm who provide about 80% of the processing chips in Mobile devices – the iPhone for example, has a series of Arm 11 cores.
At any rate, the story is partly/mainly about the fact that these Arm 11 processors are being superseded by something called the ‘Cortex A9’ range – which simply are multi-core processors.
The advantage of a multi-core processor, for those of you not in the know, is that you can (a) run each core slower and (b) consume less power (than a faster chip), whilst still getting the same work done. This is especially important in Mobile devices where the battery consumption is an always-important issue.
Rather than replicate the story here, I’d advise you to take a look through at by clicking here.
Certainly, for the multimedia-intensive applications that Mobile devices are being increasingly expected to perform (see here), this sort of processing is going to become more and more important.
If you want to check out Arm’s website, go here.
[Via: BBC News]
