It is interesting the way that ARM and LINARO work closely together in developing ARM chipsets and Android/Linux, so closely that a LINARO developer conference presentation can spell out the next 4 years in ARM implementation so very very clearly and succinctly. And you get the strong impression that they know today what is going to be in Android 5 and Android 6, items that haven't even been announced yet.
This is a download presentation, so you will find it on your desktop or your download folder. There is a yearly time line in there, which after 1 year shows all signs of tracking 100% true to form.
http://cs.dogpile.com/ClickHandler.ashx?du=http%3a%2f%2fwww.linaro.org%2fdocu...Now, Intel and MicroSoft are ARM licensee companies, so none of this is news to them. They had people sitting there at the conference.
Google is getting ready to combine Google OS into Android (or share the feature sets, same difference) and Intel is readying their Medfield low power chips and Microsoft is getting Win 8 for Arm ready and Ubuntu already has their combined desktop, tablet, phone software already released and ready to go.
That's on the bigger guy's end of the pool --- on the shallow end you have 40 nanometer dual core A9 chips shipping from Rockchip and Media with Allwinner laying back on the dual core stuff while pulling together their very first 28 nanometer quad core A7 chipset.
What is Allwinner up to? The license for the brand new A7 chipset is one set price, you can put 4-6 of them on the same dieset you have been using, they support Mali 400 graphics (license already paid for) and .... here is the kicker, they are part of the new
big LITTLE setup and you know the A15 shared calls and Mali 6xx GPU calls are already built into that A7 license design that you just bought this summer.
You can pick up the A15 license after a year of making money with 4 each A7 cores on your old dieset, run cooler, draw less power and still break the 2 gigahertz performance wall and sell the shite out of them.
And you can kick everybody's ass for a whole year at a cool running over 2 gigahertz with 4 of the little A7 suckers
on the exact same die set everyone already has a spot for in every phone design and tablet design. This makes it easy for them to drop your new chip into their existing Mali 400 designs.
Watch all the Chinese phone and tablet makers scurry about like crazy over the next year .... the low end of the pool is where the real progress is marked. Tegra 3 is a 1.5 gigahertz short lived freak high end chip, a nice short lived freak chip as are all the custom Apple chips, but not part of the main long term processor world really. Them high end boys get $500 a device getting there a year or so earlier than everyone else, but if you wait until it becomes fully ripe, widespread technology like big LITTLE will be very very sweet.
And then comes the new generation of 64 bit ARM chips .....