Aimed at mobile Internet access, ARM has launched the Cortex-A5 processor, which is available with up to four cores.
"The Cortex-A5 processor scales from ultra low cost handsets and lifestyle internet devices all the way to consumer, embedded, and industrial devices - anything that can be connected to the internet," said Eric Schorn, v-p of marketing at ARM.
Few details are available.
It includes the firm's TrustZone security block and its 128-bit SIMD Neon multimedia engine, first introduced with the Cortex-A8.
"The single core Cortex-A5 provides a migration path for existing ARM926EJ-S and ARM1176JZ-S processor licensees," said the firm. "It offers nearly twice the power-efficiency relative to these predecessors."
Along with the core, ARM had released a physical IP package for 40nm chips, including low-leakage, said the firm, logic libraries optimised for TSMC's 40LP process.
The core is compatible with existing Cortex-A tools and software, said ARM, including Android, Adobe Flash, Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), JavaFX, Linux, Microsoft Windows Embedded, Symbian and Ubuntu.
Industry insiders have seen ARM's lack of full Adobe Flash support as an impediment to acceptance in netbooks.
"The performance of the Cortex-A5 processor, when combined with Adobe's recently-announced support for Cortex-A profile processors in Flash Player 10.1, will allow users of ARM processor-based systems to view the same internet video content previously accessible only to users of x86-based systems," said Nathan Brookwood, research fellow at Insight 64, on behalf of ARM.
The processor has already been launched by Samsung, and un-named others, and delivery is slated for Q4 this year.
At the same time, ARM announced further intellectual property (IP) products in its AMBA family: a network interconnect, extensions to its dynamic memory controller, and a verification and performance exploration tool.
The network interconnect (NIC-301) majors on quality of service (QoS), said the firm, balancing latency with guaranteed bandwidth.
It is aimed at Cortex CPUs, Mali graphics processors (GPUs) and video processors.
The DMC-342 memory controller family adds support for LPDDR2 memories.
And the verification and performance exploration tool (VPE-301) enables 'what if' scenarios to be explored with Cortex-Mali-customer IP combinations prior to software or silicon availability.
It substitutes RTL with components that generate statistical traffic profiles.
A white paper "Traffic Management for Optimizing Media-Intensive SoCs" is available.