Samsung announced that it has taped out the hardened core of the first Cortex-A15 processor-based MPCore system on chip for mobile computing devices, using its own 32nm low power high-K metal gate (HKMG) process.

Implemented by the Samsung Austin Research Center, the dual core SoC reached more than 1GHz with final ready to market speeds likely to approach 2GHz and integrated into the Exynos 5xxx series (with the Exynos 5250 being one) which was unveiled earlier this year.

The arrival of the Cortex-A15 means that smartphones (or mobile devices) that will use the Cortex-A15 are likely to come to the market by the end of the year.

It is unlikely though that it will power the Apple iPhone 5 because the development window is too small and Apple is likely to go for a quad core Cortex-A9 implementation at this stage.

Instead, we believe that Samsung will try to coincide the launch of the Cortex-A15 with the launch of Windows RT (otherwise known as Windows for ARM) scheduled for around September 2012. Samsung didn't say what graphics cores it used in the processor although we suspect that it will be the Mali-T604.

Check our liveblog tracking the best Samsung Galaxy S3 pay monthly contract deals as well as PAYG and unlocked plus our stream of artcles on the Galaxy S3 saga including the endless list of rumours from the last few weeks and a truckload of pictures from the event. You can read through our liveblog of the event, one which lasted more than an hour and was attended by our very own mobile editor, Rob Kerr.