ARM Aims at Intel, Cortex A15 Headed for Smartphones, Notebooks and Servers

Anandtech ^ | 9/9/2010 12:01:00 AM | Anand Lal Shimpi

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Last month TI announced it was the first to license ARM’s next-generation Eagle core. Today, ARM is announcing the official name of that core: it’s the ARM Cortex A15.

Architectural details are light, and ARM is stating that first silicon will ship in 2012 at 32/28nm. Here’s what we do know. The Cortex A15 will be a multi-core CPU, designs can have as few as a single core but most will have 2 - 4 cores depending on their target market.

The cores will all be superscalar out-of-order designs and support Long Physical Address Extensions (greater than 32-bit memory addressing). I suspect the cores will be an evolution of the Cortex A9. The Cortex A15 will support extensions to the ARMv7 instruction set to enable hardware virtualization support (among other things).

The Cortex A15 will feature private L1 caches but a shared L2 cache (similar to the A9). The L2 cache is stated to be low latency and up to 4MB in size, although smartphones will probably see smaller versions. ARM is promising FP and SIMD performance improvements, but it isn't saying anything more than that. 

ARM is listing performance as 5x a Cortex A8 but we don’t have a good estimate vs. Cortex A9. Clock targets are as follows:

1) 1 - 1.5GHz single or dual-core for smartphones and mobile devices

2) 1 - 2GHz dual or quad-core for netbooks/notebooks/nettops

3) 1.5 - 2.5GHz quad-core for home and web servers

ARM is targeting more than just smartphones with the Cortex A15.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Related thread:

TI First to License ARM's Next-Generation Eagle Core ( Tablets & Smartphones for 2012 )

Now it is getting very interesting.

[ShadowAce]

[rarestia]

Intel’s a little nervous. We had a lunch and learn with them last week, and in a private conversation with their R&D rep, she said to watch TI. Nehalem is an absolutely amazing chipset architecture, but with all great innovations spawn newer, better innovations.

Don’t rest on your laurels, Intel/AMD. The proc market is primed for a new kid on the block.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Nvidia Tegra was discussed in the comments to this article also....and there is Samsung with the Hummingbird...there are a fair number of possible players in the new game.