ARM Holdings has announced its latest microprocessor which aims at being the new brain of smart phones and other gadgets, helping them perform faster and lend longer battery life. The new microprocessor which might revolutionize the gadget world forever had been christened the Cortex-45, and promises to exhibit better performance than its predecessors ARM11 and ARM9.

The Cortex-45 is all set be shipped as a design to licensees in the fourth quarter, and will compete with Intel’s Atom chip. ARM is confident that its new design is much more power efficient than Intel's. Previously code-named Sparrow, the Cortex-A5 will fit as the lowest cost and most energy efficient processor in ARM’s line-up of 25 processors, which are used by more than 600 customers.

ARM's Marketing Manager, Travis Lanier, shared that the latest chip is fast enough to run a laptop or notebook, and can be used in almost all devices including cell phones, a variety of appliances, smart power meters and digital picture frames. Also, Lanier shared that the Cortex-45 will come in two flavors - a general-purpose processor running at 1 GHz that consumes about 80 milliwatts; and a low-power, very efficient chip that runs at 500 MHz.

The chip was announced on Wednesday at the company's annual ARM TechCon3 conference in Santa Clara, California, and is due for release to ARM's 600-plus manufacturing partners in December.