Up to 60 per cent faster than the A9. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2014/02/11/arm-cortex-a17/1
I am hoping the A17 is a bit more promising than the A15. The A15 just doesn't seem to have the performance per watt ratio that works well, at least for phones. It might be higher performance than the A17 here, but it also is a fair bit thirstier on power, even in a big.little config, which also increases chip cost because of die area. I am wondering if/when OEMs realize that maybe "octocore" designs aren't the way to go. I'd think, especially in a phone, the best setup would be 2 A17s and a single A7 if you need a big.little configuration. I can't imagine it would be that difficult for the OS to schedule it appropriately. Chip would cost a lot less than a 4+4 design and probably be roughly as powerful for a lot of workloads.
So, is this basically just a more power efficient A15? It seems to be pretty similar to it in most ways, except for power consumption. Also, ARM is getting to be just as bad as Intel and AMD when it comes to naming products. Their naming schemes are much simpler but still don't make much sense. On another note, I'm a little surprised its taking so long for the A9 to go away.
I agree, the the octocores aren't ideal. I thought big.LITTLE was kind of a dumb idea - it's a pain for fabrication systems and software developers to work with; it was a sloppy solution with good market potential (8 cores in a phone or tablet). But, what many people tend to forget is the A15, while not as power efficient as A9, still (generally) had better performance-per-watt compared to most Intel Atoms and similarly clocked Celerons.