CES 2010 is underway, which means that consumer electronics manufacturers are bringing out their best & brightest to put on display. Among them are mobile processor company ARM, the folks behind the engine running Apple’s iPhone, Google’s new Nexus One and others.
While the iPhone’s processor is based on an ARM Cortex A8, all eyes have been anxiously awaiting news of the ARM Cortex A9, according to MacRumors. They believe that Apple is an ARM licensee and that, combined with their earlier acquisition of chipmaker P.A. Semi, may be developing their own processors for forthcoming devices, including the next iPhone as well as the tablet rumored to be unveiled on January 27.
Focused with laser precision on the mobile space, ARM’s Cortex A9 is the next generation of multi-core designs for such processors. The new line is expected to scale beyond 2 GHz while drawing less than 0.25 W of power per CPU, and compare favorably to Intel’s competing Atom processor.
ARM has a YouTube video (embedded below) demonstrating side-by-side performance between a 1.6GHz Atom netbook and a Cortex A9 development board. While not scientific benchmarks by any means, the impressive thing about this video is that the Cortex A9 processor used in this demo is only running at a mere 500MHz compared to the Intel Atom’s 1.6GHz -- yet browsing performance is roughly the same.
