ARM have announced their new Cortex-A7 MPCore processor. This is touted to provide 5 times the energy-efficiency of the Cortex-A8, while consuming one fifth the size. Just as the previous Cortex-M3 series has been effective at moving designers on from the exceptionally popular ARM7TDMI cores, the Cortex-A7 is targeted at the still popular ARM9 family. Using 28nm process technology, the Cortex-A7 occupies a mere 0.5mm2 of realestate.
In addition to this, ARM have announced the 'Big.LITTLE' feature - a multi-core processor with different speed/functionality cores. This allows tasks to be migrated from a low-power core to a high power core on demand, giving a more optimal mix of performance versus power consumption.
For more details, see here.
