ARM is expecting growth in high-end phones and tablets to begin slowing, but as we've written, it expects midrange and lower-end devices and servers to pick up some of the slack. That may be what's behind all of the CPU architectures the company has announced for low-end and midrange phones recently: we already have the 64-bit Cortex A53 and the 32-bit Cortex A12 coming to devices this year, and now ARM has announced the Cortex A17 to carry the torch into 2015.

The A17 is a 32-bit CPU core that uses the 32-bit ARMv7-A instruction set, unlike the 64-bit ARMv8 chips that will begin to trickle out later this year and into next year. ARM promises CPU performance that's 60 percent higher than an old Cortex A9 core running at the same clock speed and about 40 percent faster than A12, and chipmakers will be able to use up to four A17 CPU cores in their SoCs. Unlike A12, A17 is also compatible with ARM's big.LITTLE CPU technology. Like the current Cortex A15, A17 CPU cores can be paired with lower-power Cortex A7 cores to balance performance and power consumption.

AnandTech's analysis claims Cortex A17 will deliver performance similar to 2012's high-end Cortex A15 while using less power, which sounds about right for a chip expected to ship in volume in 2015. Both A12 and A17 will show up in places where you can find Cortex A7 and lower-end Qualcomm Krait architectures today; phones like the Moto G or low-cost tablets like Asus' MemoPad HD 7 will be an ideal fit. Some companies won't even wait until 2015 to give us our first A17-based chips—MediaTek's MT6595, an octo-core big.LITTLE SoC paired with a PowerVR Series 6 GPU, is apparently sampling now and should show up in shipping devices toward the end of the year.