Freescale planning to bring out new chips

Freescale processors aren’t a very familiar name in the computers arena in the US, but they sure are found in many Chinese low-power devices as tablets and e-readers. Although Freescale hasn’t been active lately when it comes to churning out new processors, the scenario seems to have changed now with the chip-maker announcing plans to introduce a new line of low power, ARM-based chips in the successive months.

Three chips, named the i.MX 6Solo, i.MX 6Dual, and i.MX 6Quad, will be launched and will be based on the ARM Cortex-A9 architecture. Freescale is reportedly aiming to bring these chips to power tablets and other similar low power devices like e-readers, etc. Although the chip-maker hasn’t been a leader in the multi-core processor area, with these new chips Freescale will become one of the first manufacturers to put out quad-core ARM chips. Reportedly, the company also claims that its latest quad-core chip will prove to be more power-efficient than single or dual-core chips under certain load conditions. However, you will always get sufficient performance on tap with such low power consumption. That apart, all of the new Freescale chips will render support for 3D graphics and HD video. You can also fairly expect the quad-core chip to perform resource-intensive jobs as recording stereoscopic 3D video.

The success of the upcoming chips from Freescale in this already competitive market of low-power chip manufacturers will be known when it lands on to some OEMs. Freescale promises that the chips will come very cheap for manufacturers with the i.MX 6Solo coming for as cheap as under $10, while the quad-core i.MX 6Quad will fetch more than $20 for the chip-maker. The chip-maker will supposedly send out samples of the new chips by the second quarter of this year and devices powered by these chips will be seen sometime near the end of this year.

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