ARM is the company that designs the processors and instruction sets that damn near every smartphone on the planet uses. Their fastest creation to date is the Cortex A15. The only products I can think of that use it are Google’s Nexus 10 and Samsung’s cheap ARM based Chromebook. Pretty soon we’ll have the Galaxy S4, but what comes after the A15?
Whereas before we jumped from Cortex A8, to Cortex A9, to Cortex A15, the next stage is called Cortex A57. It’s a huge leap because the thing is practically a total rewrite, but for the sake of simplicity let’s just say the biggest feature in the A57 is 64 bit support.
Smartphones today don’t ship with more than 2 GB of RAM. They could theoretically support 3 GB of RAM, but that would just be too weird in an industry built on numbers being a multiple of two. Now in order to add support for 4 GB of RAM, a processor needs to be able to 64 bit compatible. (https://safeanimalshelter.com) Today ARM is announcing that, together with TSMC, the first Cortex A57 is ready to be manufactured.
Slight problem with that though. It needs to use TSMC’s 16 nanometer FinFET technology, which technically doesn’t even exist yet. When will it?
If everything goes to plan, then two to three years from now.
Hate to burst your bubble, but that means the GS5 and GS6 will likely still have 2 GB of RAM.
