ARM has introduced the Cortex™-A15 MPCore processor that they say delivers a 5x performance improvement over today’s advanced smartphone processors, within a comparable energy footprint. In advanced infrastructure applications the Cortex-A15 processor running at up to 2.5GHz will enable highly scalable solutions within constantly shrinking energy, thermal and cost budgets. The Cortex-A15 processor is available for licensing today and, they say, is targeted at manufacture in 32nm, 28nm and future geometries.

The Cortex-A15 extends the capabilities of the ARM Cortex-A Series by adding hardware support for OS virtualization, soft-error recovery, larger memory addressability and system coherency.

With this core it is also clear that they hope to enter new markets that up until now have eluded them. For example they talk about the way that cloud computing and Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat said “Everything from handheld devices to the network infrastructure will require more performance and efficiency to handle the increasing amounts of information that will emerge from the use of remote resources”. There has been a lot of chatter that this means they are going after the server market which may well deliver more Oomph per Watt than the more traditional Intel processors.

It also appears as if ARM is looking to leverage its dominance in some markets by leveraging their other technology, such as their MALI Graphics. In this way they would be able to tackle over more of the chip area and increase their royalties per device significantly. But what about the tablet market? Without a full blown Windows, which currently does not run on the ARM processors, this would be a stretch. But wait - “Microsoft is pleased to be working with ARM to help OEMs deliver immersive user experiences and seamless connectivity by extending Windows and the benefits of the cloud to specialized devices for consumers and enterprises,” said Olivier Fontana, director, worldwide partner and field marketing for Windows Embedded at Microsoft Corp. So I guess they could be looking at moving into Intel’s space even more.

-----------------------------------------------
Brian Bailey – keeping you covered