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While Qualcomm and other ARM licensees unveil plans for 1.5GHz and dual-core mobile processors, ARM itself is looking ahead to even more powerful devices and its much vaunted attack on Intel's server territory. It has introduced its latest architecture, the Cortex-A15 MPCore or Eagle, which will be licensable by chipmakers looking to create silicon for a wide range of high performance products, especially cloud infrastructure.

This platform takes the Cortex family up the scale from smartphones, and outlines a roadmap to quad-core configurations with clock speeds of 2.5GHz. This could make tablets, superphones and other devices about five times as powerful, with the same or lower power consumption, by 2012 - as well as taking ARM into the market for servers, particularly low power blade products needed for the cloud.

ARM assembled key allies at its launch event. STMicro, Texas Instruments and Samsung were the first to announce silicon support. "I'm very excited to see someone who knows power come up the performance curve," said Mitch Markow, strategic processor technologist with Dell, who said the PC and server maker was looking at the new core "very closely".

There were few details of Eagle to add to the broad outline of ARM's roadmap laid down earlier in the year. Those will be made available later in 2010 said the UK firm. But it is clear that Eagle is a major design departure for ARM, and heavily geared to new markets such as servers. The A15 will keep power low by implementing new process technologies - ARM has designed it for the 32nm and 28nm introductions by key manufacturers IBM, GlobalFoundries and Samsung. However, while these three will make chips based on the new core, there was no mention of a version at leading foundry TSMC.

Eagle is capable of 2.5GHz clock speed though ARM would only say that single-thread performance would be about five times that of the current high end, A9. For multiprocessing, four CPUs can be clustered, sharing an integral L2 cache, and two clusters can be linked by the previously unveiled AMBA 4 bus design.

ARM also said the entire CPU could be put into sleep mode in 10 microseconds, allowing a more aggressive use of sleep than current processors can manage. This highlights why cloud servers, not devices, are the key target. For instance, as EETimes points out, the total address space is 1 terabyte, far more than mobile devices need. Hardware virtualization will be supported by existing products such as VMWare and work with ARM's TrustZone security system.

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