ARM preys on smartphones and servers with Eagle

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 9 Sep 2010 at 05:00

ARM has unveiled its next generation "Eagle" processor, pitching it at everything from smartphones to energy-efficient servers.

The British chip designer claims the Cortex-A15 will offer five times the performance of the A8 chips found in today's high-end smartphones, yet consume no more power.

The A15 will be initially produced at 32nm or 28nm, although ARM claims the roadmap stretches down to 20nm. It will deliver clock speeds of up to 2.5GHz.

It's really like taking what you normally do on a desktop and putting it in your pocket

"It's really like taking what you normally do on a desktop and putting it in your pocket," Eric Schorn, ARM's vice president of marketing told PC Pro.

The processor will find its way into a variety of devices, according to Schon, including tablet PCs, "large screen mobile computing devices" and set-top boxes. "If you go into the laptop aisle [of a computer store], they all kind of look the same," he said. "We're not going to play in that unified monolithic space. We're going to do exciting things."

The A15 isn't only aimed at consumer devices. Schorn cited mobile phone base stations and low-end servers as other potential destinations for the processor. "What we deliver is the source code, the design, the blueprint [of the processor]," Schorn said. "It can be implemented in different ways. There is some very different silicon that can be brought to bear."

Virtual mobile OS

The Cortex-A15 also offers hardware support for virtualisation. This could lead to smartphones with "multiple personalities", where the owner has one virtual machine for business purposes and another for personal use.

Schorn even predicts a future where smartphone owners will come home and use their smartphone's "personal" virtual machine on their television set-top box. "Virtualisation allows you to take these virtual machines and move them around," he said.

The virtual OSes could also make the deployment of operating system upgrades far easier for network and businesses alike. "Instead of downloading patch kits... my office could just supply a whole new environment in a single package to replace the old environment," Schorn predicts.

The Cortex-A15 has been released to licencees, including Samsung and Texas Instruments, but it will be at least late 2012 before products featuring the processor arrive on the shelves.