Arm’s unveiling of the capabilities its Cortex-A15 processor design, previously codenamed Eagle, expands the possibilities for Arm-based chips well beyond the mobile phone industry they dominate.
The launch in San Francisco on Wednesday night also expanded Arm’s share price in London on Thursday as it rose 4 per cent to a new 52-week peak of 403p – 200 per cent higher than a year ago.
The market’s reaction seems a fair reflection of the significance of the launch to Arm. Rivals Intel and AMD ought to be concerned.
The chipmakers have been emphasising the quick return on investment that can be achieved from their latest energy-saving server chips, but Arm trumps both with the smaller power demands of its chips and the A15 has the muscle to take them on in the data centre.
With HP and Dell present to provide testimonials, Mike Inglis, head of Arm’s processor division, described how the A15 would give five times the performance of Arm’s most powerful mainstream processor design today – the A8, which is found in many high-end smartphones.
The A15 is scalable from smartphones to high-end servers. Mr Inglis described dual-core, quad-core and octo-core configurations and processor speeds of 2.5Ghz in a small power envelope. There is support for virtualisation, memory support up to 1 terabyte and advanced error correction for data integrity.
Texas Instruments, the first licensee of the design, showed a roadmap of products for the A15 combined with its OMAP platform that led from smartphones to eReaders, smart TVs and home automation. It cited savings of 15 per cent in power and double the performance of the A9 – the Arm design expected to first feature in products this Christmas.
It is likely to take two years for the A15 design to work its way through to products on the market, Warren East, Arm chief executive (pictured), cautioned.
He told me software and systems would have to be adapted for Arm-based servers as well, although the company’s own website has been powered by Arm server chips for the past year.
Intel may have to defend its PC territory from Arm, but, with its Atom chip, it is also attempting to invade the smartphone, smart TV and embedded chip markets where Arm has a strong presence.
Mr East said Intel could not match Arm at the other end of the scale where its Cortex-M0 is the company’s smallest, lowest power and most energy efficient processor.
“Intel talks about embedded, but they’re talking about something that has three times the number of transistors of the Cortex-A9,” he said.
The far smaller M0 design is ideal for simple sensor devices using chips costing $1 or less, but Mr East said the volumes sold of such chips would be “immense”.
This explained in part his comments earlier in the evening, when he announced Arm would celebrate its 20th birthday in two months’ time and 20bn Arm-based processors had shipped in that time.
“But we’ve barely scratched the surface, we’re really only just getting started,” he said, predicting Arm microprocessors would hit the 100bn mark in the next decade.
