This week ARM has officially announced a new processor core called Cortex-A72. The British company promises that the new ARMv8 (64-bit capable) based design will deliver "up to 3.5x" performance of the now-obsolete Cortex-A15 introduced in September 2010 while the energy consumption will be reduced by 75% in similar workloads. Just like the current Cortex-A57, the new cores will be manufactured by TSMC on the same 16 nm FinFET+ process and can be paired with the low-energy Cortex-A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration. According to ARM, the first devices with processors including Cortex-A72 cores can be expected in early 2016.
Along with Cortex-A72 the company also introduced an updated interconnect interface and a new GPU. The new CCI-500 (Cache Coherent Interconnect) link replaces its predecessor CCI-400 and promises twice the bandwidth, increasing the memory performance by up to 30%, which will improve the handling of 4K content. The new Mali-T880 GPU will also assist with this, providing (again, according to ARM) up to 1.8x performance of Mali-T760 (for example, in Samsung's Exynos 5433). It's designed to work with the Mali-DP550 display processor and the Mali-V550 video processor, connected via a third-party LPDDR3/4 memory system.
ARM has confirmed that the new design will be licensed to Huawei's subsidiary HiSilicon, MediaTek and Rockchip, but we expect Samsung and Qualcomm to follow suit shortly.
Source(s)
ARM (Overview | Cortex-A72 | CoreLink CCI 500 | Mali-T880)