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  • DanNeely - Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - link

    Is "no-fills" supposed to be "no-frills"? (You used the former both times.) If not, what does it mean?
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - link

    Yes, no-frills. Thanks for pointing that out. Apparently Word decided it needed replaced without telling me...
  • Pissedoffyouth - Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - link

    Soon to be released as the GPU in the next Mediatek flagship SoC!
  • jjj - Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - link

    A bit odd to announce this for 2017 without a new small core for wearables. A7 is rather old and A53 is not that efficient.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - link

    Arm v7 is an old instruction set at this point, they're probably well past the point of tweaking hardware to get better power consumption levels outside of process improvements. At some point Arm v8 will trickle down to smaller parts; but it's benefits are only when doing things. Wearables/IoT devices spend virtually all of their time at idle where a better instruction set won't help.
  • name99 - Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - link

    To take an example, what little we know about the Apple Watch is that it is running a single core much like (identical to?) the A5 core (so 32-bit, ARMv7), severely underclocked, and probably most of the code as Thumb.
    Relevant to this topic, the watch GPU is apparently a PowerVR SGX543 (single core, the iOS A5's had an SGX543MP2).
    So basically the Apple Watch is about the equivalent of an A4/iPhone4 (slightly better CPU, but running quite a bit slower; better GPU but again running a lot slower).
  • MikhailT - Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - link

    I think this is just the first basic GPU ARM is announcing now for 2017 but it is not meant for expensive watches, mostly for cheap embedded stuff like TVs and low/med-end watches. For these, having 2x pref/w and low power is all ARM plans to do and it would be using the same nm process node as today, it will be the cheapest SoC in 2017 on a mature 2x process.

    I suspect they have a design already in planning for 2017+ that will be more efficient then Mali-470 and cost more to produce on a newer 1x nm process.
  • jjj - Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - link

    Never mentioned v7 or v8 that's not the point ,the point was perf, power and area. Wearables are not just watches, glasses are that too and those are far more difficult than watches. Been waiting for years to see if they properly address the market, apparently not just yet and that might just give others(Intel, Imagination) a window of opportunity.
  • extide - Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - link

    Well, the Cortex A5 is actually the most power efficient Cortex core, so I am surprised we haven't seen it in wearables. Although I don't think it can be used in a multi-processor config, which may or may not matter to some manufacturers, and could be a reason we see them utilizing A7's.
  • mczak - Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - link

    Cortex-A5 can be easily used in multiprocess configs - there's actually snapdragons out there which do exactly that (4 Cortex-A5 in msm8225q). All Cortex-A chips can, with the exception of the very first one (Cortex-A8).
    Albeit I'm not sure it's really the most energy efficient one, at least once you factor in the necessary external (memory etc.) stuff Cortex-A7 might well be just as good.
  • Der2 - Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - link

    Well, were going to be seeing a lot if these in the foreseeable future. Better battery life, yay.

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