Mobile processors that power your smartphones and tablets have certainly come a long way from their humble beginnings, hitting the 1GHz mark some time back, before more and more cores were thrown into the mix as software on the mobile platform gets ever more complicated along the way, requiring additional processing power to boot. Both TSMC and GlobalFoundries are global semiconductor foundries who intend to raise the bar of the processing power by the time 2014 arrives, as they are said to be developing a 20nm chip for their next generation ARM based mobile processors.
Right now, the speed of 2.3GHz can be achieved at 28nm, making it the fastest clock speed by a mobile processor, where it sees action in the Snapdragon 800 and Tegra 4i, and both of them are tipped to arrive in late 2013 or early 2014. Good news then, that the next generation of processors are said to overtake this clock speed by a considerable margin thanks to the help of a far smaller manufacturer node of 20nm. It is said that this 20nm manufacturing node will be able to yield a 30% faster clock speed with 1.9 times better density at 25% less power consumption, so we could very well be looking at 3GHz processors soon. Hopefully the battery technology on such 3GHz devices will be able to keep up with the pace.
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