ARM has introduced the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor. The processor claims to deliver a five times performance improvement over advanced smartphone processors, within a comparable energy footprint. It is supported by specifically optimised ARM Physical IP that has been developed jointly with the processor.

It has been reported that the Cortex-A15 MPCore Processor is capable of speeds up to 2.5 GHz, can support up to 4 MB of L2 cache, and can address up to 1 terabyte of memory. The company has said its smartphone A15 line will run between 1 GHz and 1.5 GHz in both single and dual-core configurations.

The new processor in the ARM Cortex-A Series comes with additional hardware support for OS virtualisation, soft-error recovery, larger memory addressability and system coherency. The processor enjoys full application compatibility with other processors in the series. This is aimed at enabling immediate access to a developer and software ecosystem, including Android, Adobe Flash Player, Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), JavaFX, Linux, Microsoft Windows Embedded Compact 7, Symbian and Ubuntu, along with more than 700 ARM Connected Community members providing applications software, hardware and software development tools, middleware and SoC design services.

The processor is also supported by a range of ARM technologies including the AMBA 4 compliant CoreLink system IP, CoreSight debug and trace IP, Mali Graphics and a set of development tools. The processor is available for licensing and is targeted at manufacture in 32nm, 28nm and future platforms. The company hopes to offer a 20nm A15 version in the future.