ARM used its presence at TechCon3 today to unveil a new processor architecture built to speed up lower-cost handhelds. The Cortex-A5 is about twice as power-efficient as older budget designs but shares many of the same foundations as fast processors like the Cortex-A8 found in the iPhone 3GS, including the NEON vector instructions that boost media and some other tasks. It can work either as a very low-power single-core design or scale up to quad-core for more demanding devices.
