Mobiles to take a great leap forward

Moore's Law dictates that chips will shrink and get more powerful

Technology legend Gordon Moore may have been working at Intel when he thought up the law that bears his name, but it applies to any and every microprocessor.

Be the chip inside a PC, or mobile phone, the logic of Moore's Law dictates that they will get progressively more powerful thanks to the inexorable progress of the semiconductor industry.

This has led the PC through successive generations - 286, 386, 486, Pentium - and now mobile handsets are about to embark on a generational shift of their own.

More than 80% of the chips inside mobile phones are designed by UK firm Advanced Risc Machines (Arm) and the most versatile phones of 2008, such as Apple's iPhone 3G, have one or more Arm 11 processing cores onboard.

The Arm 11 series debuted in 2003 and now, five years later, the phones and the applications they run are starting to stretch it to the limit.

Rob Coombs, a spokesman for Arm, said the Arm 11 was roughly 11 times the processing power of the Arm 7 chip that debuted in 1993 and is still used today in the most basic phones.

But now, said Mr Coombs, the Arm 11 family is starting to make way for the Cortex range of processors. He claims the Cortex A9 series will have 30-100 times the processing power of those 1993 era chips.

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