October 25, 2011 09:02 pm EDT

Freescale joins ARM A5 and M4 cores at the hip for performance and power savings

You may have noticed a trend recently -- pairing slightly less powerful cores that sip power, with more robust ones that can chug through demanding applications. NVIDIA's Tegra 3 will be packing an underclocked fifth core, while ARM's big.LITTLE initiative matches a highly efficient 28nm A7 with the beefy A15. Now Freescale is planning to use the same trick, but you won't find its asymmetrical CPUs in your next tablet or smartphone. Its platform, which marries a Cortex M4 to a Cortex A5, isn't meant to compete with the latest Snapdragon. These chips will find homes in factories and in-dash infotainment systems which have increasingly sophisticated UIs, but don't need to push thousands of polygons. Software development tools will land before this quarter is out and the first batch of silicon will be announced in Q1 of 2012. Looks like the era of "dual-core" meaning two identical cores has officially come to an end.

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Freescale joins ARM A5 and M4 cores at the hip for performance and power savings originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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