The Cortex-A15 supports an extended address space with large physical address extensions, NEON Advanced SIMD for multimedia, and hardware virtualization. These and other system enhancements bring the four cores together in a much higher-performance category than previous ARM cores.

ARM teams are spending a lot of time with the electronic design automation, operating system, and tools communities making sure the core IP smoothly integrates with the rest of the SoC so that software developers can get running quickly. A full Cortex-A15 simulator is available today, and virtualization tools and operating systems are already running. Read more info on some of the first announcements of support for the simulator.

Texas Instruments (TI), Samsung, and ST-Ericsson are already licensing the Cortex-A15. TI’s Brian Carlson, who will be discussing more on the company’s plans at the ARM Techcon in November, has pointed at SmartReflex 3 power management technology as key to their implementation. Samsung has very creative things in mind for the Galaxy Tab’s future with this. It’ll be exciting to see everything that emerges around the Cortex-A15.

ARM www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a15.php www.embedded-computing.com/p46270