One of the major challenges in designing mobile processor is how can they squeeze the core performance out without significantly impact its power consumption. Although Intel Atom, a X86 based processor is great in performance with maximum clocking at 1.6GHz, but it suffers excessive current drawn that affect the portable devices’ battery life. Just recently, Samsung, one of the ARM licensees is collaborating with Intrinsity to come out a new series of ARM Cortex-A8 based processor targeted for mobile market. Codenamed as Hummingbird, it is planned to be clocking at maximum of 1GHz, scaling up the performance up to 2000MIPS while still maintaining its low thermal envelope.

Hummingbird core will be supported by 32kB data and instruction on-die cache besides ARM neon multimedia extension. If you recall, Apple Inc’s latest 3G S iPhone is based on Samsung S5PC100 running at 600MHz and has been rated as one of the most powerful mobile devices in consumer market. And now with the Hummingbird in development cycle ready for next generation iPhone, consumers can expected a much smoother and faster mobile devices suitable for high end market with much more CPU cycles available for other processing tasks.

No price and actual available date yet,this will definitely post some threats to Intel next generation Atom Moorestown processor as well as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon series in mobile market.