Cell phones seem to go through phases, from big to small, to big, and now back to small,(at least in some sense)and smartphones are somewhat following this trend. Smartphones started out as small yet fairly bulky handsets, and as we’ve progressed through the ages of smartphones they have gotten bigger, thinner, and more powerful. The recent trend with smartphones seems to be designing them to be as thin and attractive as they can possibly be, but having a super thin phone has usually meant there would be some sort of a trade off, most commonly in the way of battery life. We’re slowly starting to move away from that as OEM’s are coming up with ways to provide excellent battery life inside of extremely thin handsets, and now ARM is doing their part with their new series of next generation A72 chips.
These new chips are being touted by ARM as having the capability to deliver three times as much performance as chips being used in the present state, and we should end up seeing the new series of A72’s as early as next year. Not only that but if smartphones stay on the current trend of thins is better, manufacturers will be able to throw in these new chips from ARM and get stellar performance but without draining on power as they should allow for 75% less power consumption within a thin profile design. Manufacturers looking to use ARM’s new A72 chip designs could see substantial performance gains in future processors although we won’t be able to tell how they contrast to real world usage for quite some time.
ARM chips are used in a majority of mobile device processors that are manufactured by tons of different OEMs, so it’ll be interesting to see how performance driven next year’s handsets become and stack up against each other. If there’s one thing that people wouldn’t mind having more of its performance out of their device, but certainly not at the cost of power efficiency. ARM has already lined up a number of different licenses for the A72 chip so we should expect to see these designs in a wide variety of different processors next year.