ARM today announced a new integrated processor platform for smartphones targeting the middle of the market. The platform is based on the ARM Cortex-A17 processor, which ARM says marks a 60% performance improvement over the Cortex-A9, and supports ARM's big.LITTLE architecture for power efficiency gains. The A17 processor is matched with ARM's Mali-T720 GPU for graphics performance and the ARM Mali-V500 video processor for powering 4K high-resolution displays. ARM says this new system-on-a-chip will be sampling late this year and should reach consumer devices by 2015.