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ARM Unveils Next-Gen Processor, Claims 5x Speedup

Posted by timothy on from the and-hammer dept.

unts writes "UK chip designer ARM [Note: check out this short history of ARM chips in mobile devices contributed by an anonymous reader] today released the first details of its latest project, codenamed 'Eagle.' It has branded the new design Cortex-A15, which ARM reckons demonstrates the jump in performance from its predecessors, the A8 and A9. ARM's new chip design can scale to 16 cores, clock up to 2.5GHz, and, the company claims, deliver a 5x performance increase over the A8: 'It's like taking a desktop and putting it in your pocket,' said [VP of processor marketing — Eric Schorn], and it was clear that he considers this new design to be a pretty major shot across the bows of Intel and AMD. In case we were in any doubt, he turned the knife further: 'The exciting place for software developer graduates to go and hunt for work is no longer the desktop.'"

4 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Docks by ozmanjusri · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It would be a great time to develop a standards-based dock/charger platform so we could drop our phones/tablets into an adaptor and have them display on a large monitor and accept standard USB peripherals.

    That would really shake up the Wintel alliance.

    --
    "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
  2. Re:Give ARM a chance. by PCM2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How much more mainstream can it get? ARM is everywhere. It's in your iPhone -- probably every single phone out there, actually -- in tablets, in NAS boxes, in DVD players... countless applications. If you mean it should compete with Intel CPUs for PC processors, on the other hand, one impediment may be that ARM is (at least at present) a 32-bit architecture.

    --
    Breakfast served all day!
  3. Re:Does it have 64-bit addressing? by forkazoo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    32-bit addressing was seriously impressive in 1987, compared to Acorn's then-current machine with 32KB, including video memory. But now even smartphones are starting to come with 512MB, 1GB of memory. Does ARM have a strategy for getting past 4GB?

    From what I understand, the A15 will support 40 bit physical addressing. So far, I'm not certain if that's segmented, or sane. I heard a claim that in a multicore setup, different cores might be configured with distinct memory controllers so that the various cores need not address strictly the same 40b worth of memory, enabling some sort of NUMA setup. Dunno if that will ever happen in practice. 1 TB RAM is likely to be sufficient for the commercially relevant life of the CPU.

  4. Multicore ARM and suboptimal instruction sets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm currently working with several concurrency development groups within the SUNY system; we are partnered with Oracle, Google, and IBM as well as a few others. Upon mention of ARM not a single co-worker has been able to resist going into rant mode about the lack of reasonably quick CAS and LL/SC implementations. Further, barriers and fences apparently take so long to establish that to fake a CAS you are looking at three to six hundred cycles compared to about a dozen for current generation i7's and SPARCs (optimistic CASing). Can anyone speak to the implementation of the features on this new chip?