After shipping 15 billion chips you’d think the cocky computer cowboys from Cambridge would be finished, right? Not on your life, pardner. They’ve got more tricks up their collective sleeve than a saloon gambler with a seat against the wall. They just keep dealin’ and we keep ante’ing up.

The newest ace in the hole is the Cortex-A5, announced today. The –A5 fills the enormous (not really) gap between the Cortex-A8 and ARM’s older designs in the ARM9 and ARM11 family. (For some background on ARM’s processor nomenclature, see Embedded Technology Journal, August 25, 2009.)

The A5, codenamed Sparrow, is mostly just a watered-down A8. It’s slower, and therefore cheaper, than its sibling, but still faster than anything in the Cortex R-series or the older numerically designated processors. As such, the A5 is now the entry point into the top-range A-series of ARM processors.