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.