ARM announced the Cortex-A7 MPCore processor on Wednesday, which it is touting as its most power efficient mobile processor yet. The Cortex-A7 is just one-fifth the size of the Cortex-A8 but provides 5x the energy efficiency and greater performance. The single-core chip was designed for use in budget-friendly smartphones that will be priced under $100. ARM explained that it can create a system on a chip (SoC) with better performance and longer battery life by taking advantage of “Big.LITTLE” proce...

Apple may already be working on a quad-core Apple-branded mobile processor for inclusion in upcoming iPhone, iPad and iPod touch models. Apple’s eventual move to a quad-core chipset in its iOS devices seems certain, but it looks like we now have evidence that preliminary quad-core testing may already be under way. While inspecting the source code for the Clang compiler bundled with Apple’s Xcode developer tools, an unnamed developer alerted Ars Technica to new references within the code that add ...

Apple will favor Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company over Samsung to power its next-generation iOS devices, DigiTimes said on Friday. The report aligns with an earlier Reuters report that suggested TSMC would build the next-generation A6 processor for future iPhone and iPad devices. TSMC will use its 20nm and 28nm technologies to create the new chips but may not begin supplying Apple with parts until next year. The Taiwan-based chip builder may have inked a deal to supply the successor to the A6 chip, ...