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ARM has swung a one-two punch at Intel's plans to muscle in on the smartphone and tablet space that's currently dominated by the plucky chip designers from Cambridge.
At press soirées in London and San Francisco on Wednesday, ARM announced both a design for a tiny new chip, the Cortex-A7 MPCore, and a system-on-chip scheme that will marry the new A7 with the much more robust Cortex-A15 MPCore, which was announced last September and which should see the light of day next year.
We will grit our teeth and use ARM's designation for this multi-core mashup – big.LITTLE processing – which is ARM's new marketing term for its implementation of what it, AMD, Microsoft, and others were calling "heterogeneous computing" at AMD's Fusion Summit this summer.
Simply put, heterogeous computing means putting a number of dissimilar, specialized cores on the same slice of silicon – CPU and GPU cores, for example – and parcelling out tasks to each core for the work that suits it best.
