ARM aims new processor at servers and beyond

ARM's new processor will not only power your smartphone in a few years' time, but might be found virtually everywhere, driving network infrastructure and handling the services you access - if the company's plans come to fruition.

The Cortex-A15 MPCore, announced on 9 September, builds on ARM's existing Cortex chips, but is designed to scale from smartphones to enterprise servers while still consuming as little power as possible.

"It's a huge announcement for ARM. It's the biggest thing we've ever done," said Eric Schorn, vice president of marketing for ARM's processor division.

However, because ARM does not actually manufacture chips itself, the baton now passes to partners such as Samsung, Texas Instruments and ST Ericsson to produce the silicon, which in turn gets delivered to the hardware vendors.

The upshot of this is that the Cortex-A15 is not likely to be seen in production devices until sometime near the end of 2012, according to ARM.

When it does, the new design is expected to deliver five times the performance of current chips based on the Cortex-A8, Schorn said, and some versions may have clock speeds up to 2.5GHz.

"That gives you an idea of the headroom we're handing over to the software guys to put more functionality and more capabilities into your handset. We're looking to take what is now constrained to the desktop, and enable that to move into your pocket," he explained.

With its projected performance boost, ARM also believes that the Cortex-A15 will prove attractive in areas other than just smartphones, where ARM chips already dominate.

Many of the tablet devices now coming to market already use ARM chips, but the company believes that multi-core implementations of Cortex-A15 will prove ideal in network infrastructure products such as wireless base stations and routers.

"What we can bring to the table here is improved power efficiency over the incumbent proprietary solutions, some of which consist of eight-processor chips or even 16 processors, and the challenge there is thermal constraints," said Schorn.

ARM also has its eye on servers and possibly desktop computers, areas where Intel currently dominates with its x86 architecture.

The Cortex-A15 will be able to address these markets through new capabilities added to the ARM architecture with this design, including expanded 40-bit memory addressing for up to 1TB of memory and hardware support for virtualisation.

The addition of these features brings the ARM architecture closer to the capabilities already available in processors such as Intel's Xeon and AMD's Opteron chips, which are widely deployed in servers and datacentres.

Last month, startup firm Smooth-Stone disclosed plans to market ARM-based server chips, which analysts indicated could find a home in scale-out environments such as internet datacentres.

Hardware support for virtualisation is a key capability, because it allows multiple guest operating systems to run unmodified on a single server, without significant performance penalties.

Perhaps significantly, virtualisation leader VMware has declared its backing for ARM's virtualisation features, although few specific details have been disclosed.

In a statement, VMware's Parag Patel said the company was "excited to work with ARM and its partner ecosystem" on virtualisation. ARM is also working with VirtualLogix and Open Kernel Labs.

Support is likely to focus on virtualisation for handsets at first, but the existence of a VMware hypervisor for the ARM architecture makes it more feasible for the chips to be used to power servers in dense cloud computing environments.

Another important aspect is the number of cores that can be crammed onto a single chip. The previous Cortex-A9 design supported up to four cores, but Cortex-A15 includes technology to go beyond this, allowing for processors to be designed with clusters of four cores, enabling chips with eight, 12 or even 16 cores.

The ability to provide a large number of cores while keeping power consumption low could see ARM chips appear not just in servers, but in high-end printers and other equipment.

"In the enterprise there are high-end printers and other devices that are very performance oriented, and those workloads most often can be parallelised, so it's all around the number of processors you can bring to bear on the problem," said Schorn.

Smartphone versions of the Cortex-A15 are expected to fit in the 1GHz to 1.5GHz range and have one or two cores, while ARM sees digital home entertainment boxes having dual- or quad-core chips, with servers and other enterprise kit packing multi-core chips clocked at 1.5GHz up to 2.5GHz.

However, while ARM is planning to encroach on Intel's enterprise territory, Intel is doing the same with power-sipping versions of its Atom processors for smartphones and other mobile devices. The next few years look like being very interesting for the processor market.