ARM Unveils Cortex A17 Processor, First Used in Mediatek MT6595 and Rockchip RK3288 SoCs

Finally all these ARM Cortex A17 marketing materials for Rockchip RK3288 were not some typos, but Rockchip marketing team may just have not received the memo reading “Confidential”, as ARM has now officially announced Cortex A17 processor based on ARMv7-A architecture, with support for big.LITTLE with Cortex A7, and that can be coupled with Mali-T720 mid-range GPU and Mali-V500 VPU.

After Cortex A15, and Cortex A12, you may wonder “Why? But Why did ARM had to launch yet another new core?”. Here’s the company answer to that question:

The Cortex-A17 processor offers 60% performance uplift over the Cortex-A9 processor, the current leader in mid-range mobile market, and betters the best efficiency enabling optimized solutions to address existing and new products. The Cortex-A17 processor is based on the popular ARMv7-A architecture, today’s most successful architecture in the mobile market. With over 1M apps supporting the ARMv7-A architecture, the Cortex-A17 processor is primed to bring the high-end performance levels of 2014 to next generation mid-range devices in 2015, with further increased efficiency for enabling a better user experience.

The Cortex-A17 processor is scalable up to 4 cores, each offering a full out-of-order pipeline delivering peak performance of today’s premium performance levels. A fully integrated, low-latency L2 cache controller, accelerator interfaces to target specific use cases, and high-throughput AMBA 4 ACE Coherent Bus Interface enable the Cortex-A17 processor to be tailored for the right task. Its modern design is best complemented with the latest advanced IP like ARM Mali-T720 GPU, ARM Mali-DP500 DPU, and ARM Mali-V500 VPU and CoreLink CCI-400, but is also fully backwards compatible to existing AMBA3 and AMBA4 AXI based systems based on ARM Mali-450 GPU and CoreLink NIC-400 to ease integration and time-to-market.

The Cortex-A17 processor, in combination with its high-efficiency counterpart Cortex-A7 processor, provides an ideal solution for mobile devices in 2015 and beyond, bringing the heterogeneous processing benefits of big.LITTLE Global Task Switching (GTS) to the mid-range market. Coupled with CoreLink System IP components like the CoreLink CCI-400 interconnect, Cortex-A17 and Cortex-A7 processors are the foundation for upcoming devices that are more efficient and higher performance than any solution in this class before.

I’m not quite satisfied by that answer… No comparison with Cortex A12 or A15. I’m guessing they’ve probably made some power consumption improvements compared to Cortex A15 which dissipates a lot of heat. Looking at the different cores specifications on ARM website do not find meaningful differences. Nevertheless, Cortex A17 will be used in SoC used in mobile devices (smartphones and tablets), smart TVs, over-the-top devices, automotive infotainment, and other consumer oriented markets, and seems to be used as a Cortex A9 replacement.

The first SoC officially announced with Cortex A17 is Mediatek MT6595 (which somehow will become MTK6595 on many sites) an Octacore mobile SoC with 4x Cortex A17, 4x Cortex A7 in big.LITTLE configuration fully supporting Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP) with Imagination PowerVR Series6 GPU, H.265 UHD decoding and encoding support, and an LTE modem. Mediatek MT6595 will be commercially available in H1 2014, with devices expected in H2 2014. The other SoC with Cortex A17 and probably Mali-720 GPU should be Rockchip RK3288, following the unintended leak at CES 2014…

You can find a bit more details on ARM Cortex A17 page.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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