ARM looks beyond smartphones with powerful new processor

ARM's latest Cortex processor will target servers as well as smartphones

ARM has unveiled a new processor design that promises a five-fold improvement in performance over those in today's smartphones, but which will also scale to speeds of 2.5GHz in chips aimed at other applications, including enterprise hardware.

The Cortex-A15 MPCore extends ARM's existing Cortex family of processors, but is intended to power a wider array of devices than just smartphones.

With features such as larger memory support, soft-error recovery and hardware support for operating system virtualisation, chips based on the design are likely to find their way into tablet systems, home entertainment boxes, wireless base stations and even low-power servers.

As with all ARM chips, today's announcement marks the availability of the Cortex-A15 to the firm's silicon vendor partners such as Samsung, Texas Instruments and ST Ericsson, which will build and sell chips based on the design.

However, the release of this multi-core processor marks the beginning of a push into new markets for ARM, where the frugal power consumption of its architecture could prove an advantage if it can deliver the right performance level.

"The Cortex-A15 MPCore processor will become the next major step along the industry's energy efficient computing roadmap and open up a wide range of new application possibilities for our partners," said Mike Inglis, executive vice president of ARM's processor division.

The Cortex-A15 will still drive high-end smartphones, but chips for this market are likely to be single- or dual-core versions in the 1GHz to 1.5GHz range.

However, the company foresees that home servers and web servers will be powered by quad-core chips with clock speeds of 1.5GHz up to 2.5GHz, while chips with eight cores or more are possible for enterprise infrastructure applications.

The first chips based on the Cortex-A15 are expected to be produced using 32nm and 28nm fabrication technologies, with a roadmap extending to 20nm, ARM said.