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ARM plans to unleash its key defense against the attack from Intel Atom this year, with its Eagle processor design for high end mobile devices. This aims to match Intel in performance terms while retaining ARM's traditional strengths in low power consumption. Texas Instruments this week announced that it was the first licensee of the IP for this design, pointing to the next generation of its OMAP applications processor.

The Eagle, officially called the Cortex-A Series, will be unveiled later this year. TI's early support enables it to have significant input into the definition of the platform, the company said. It aims to upgrade the OMAP range in time for 2011 devices, seeking to steal ground from Atom and also from other ARM-based processors targeted at high end mobile devices - like Qualcomm Snapdragon, which breaks the gigahertz barrier later this year, Samsung Hummingbird and the Apple A4 variant.

TI formally engaged with ARM on the Eagle project in June 2009, establishing an advanced lead partnership. The partners particularly focused on harnessing TI's low power system-on-chip platform to refine the definition of the processor core, and to speed the chipmaker's time to market. Its current high end, OMAP4, uses the Cortex-A9 core.

Remi El-Ouazzane, VP of the OMAP platform business unit at TI, said in a statement: "We are thrilled to know that our customers will be the first to leverage the new ARM processor core's far reaching innovations via our industry leading OMAP products. Successful mobile industry achievements revolve around the 'high-performance, low-power' mantra, and we believe the results of our collaborative effort echo the importance of this must-have balance."

The roadmap for the Cortex family includes three new families, as outlined earlier this year. They are codenamed Eagle, Heron and Merlin, and delivery of the IPR will start later this year or early in 2011. Eagle sits in the Cortex-A range for apps processors, the area where ARM is under most pressure from Atom - the battle between ARM and x86 is still, to a large extent, one of power efficiency versus heavyweight processing.

Heron is at the opposite end of the scale, positioned for embedded and real time devices, an area where ARM has been expanding during the past couple of years with its Cortex-R real time line. Atom is also seeking an enhanced place in this segment and Intel is working with Taiwanese foundry TSMC on an ultra-low power iteration for embedded markets. Uses for Heron would include basebands and hard disk drive control.

Finally, Merlin fits into the Cortex-M product group, which goes even more deeply into embedded applications, being designed for microcontrollers. The simplified, cost sensitive design uses only one instruction set, Thumb-2, while the 'A' and 'R' ranges also run ARM and Thumb instruction sets. ARM has only 5% of the microcontroller market, where companies like Freescale are strong, in applications such as motor and industrial control.

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