ARM's Cortex A-17 brings high-end features to mid-range phones

ARM’s new platform promises big speed increases over the Cortex A-9 and targets devices in the $200 price point range.

MediaTek CTO Kevin Jou, ARM’s Ian Ferguson, and a Via Technologies executive at the Cortex A-17 press conference in Taipei



Mid-range smartphones will be a whole lot faster next year, or at least ones with an SoC powered by ARM’s new Cortex A-17 architecture that was announced Tuesday.

ARM promises the 32-bit Cortex A-17 will have a 60 percent “performance uplift” in battery life and speed over the Cortex A-9. ARM says each CPU core will have a clock speed of 1.5 GHz. It will also feature ARM’s big.LITTLE technology as well as a *Mali T720*GPU, which offers OpenGL ES 3.0 support.



“Midrange is where most of the innovation while happen,” ARM’s Ian Ferguson, the company’s VP of segment marketing, said at a launch event in Taipei. “The A-17 will have the same type of reaction in the market place as the Cortex A-9.”



ARM didn’t specify a release timeline for the A-17, but a company spokesperson hinted at a big push to get the chip in devices slated to come out in 2015.

MediaTek announces Cortex A-17 powered SoC



Hot off ARM’s announcement of its new Cortex A-17 platform, MediaTek, an up-and-coming Taiwan-based chip designer, announced its first Cortex A-17 powered SoC: the LTE-enabled MT6595.

MediaTek’s MT6595 employs ARM’s big.LITTLE and its proprietary CorePilot technology to manage its eight cores: four of its cores are Cortex A-17s clocked between 2.2GHz to 2.5GHz while the remaining four are Cortex A7 cores clocked at 1.7GHz. For graphics, the SoC contains a PowerVR Series6 *GPU which will allow for playback of 4K content.

The real competitive advantage comes from* MediaTek’s CorePilot technology. This allows the device to manage the cores discretely, only using the ones needed for the particular task at hand. MediaTek promises big power savings and extended battery life as a result.

MediaTek has yet to announce any hardware wins, or an exact pricing structure for the new SoC but as its powered by ARM’s mid-range centric A-17, expect it in premium mid-range devices that have a subsidized price point of $99 to $199. It’s not yet known when devices featuring the chip will be available, but in all likelihood they won’t be available until late this year or in early 2015. * While the SoC is highly promising, it faces tough competition from heavyweights like Qualcomm and Samsung’s Exynos.





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