ARM Believes Cortex A15 Is a Contender for x86

After taking almost full control over the mobile space, ARM is now targeting the x86 architecture as the company plans to introduce its upcoming Cortex A15 cores not only in smartphones, tablets, and portable computing devices, but also in servers.

The Cortex A15 is the name used by ARM for its next-generation multicore processor which should offer 40 per cent more performance than the current Cortex A9. The chip can include two, four or even eight cores and can work at speeds up to 2.5GHz.

Internally, the A15 is based on the same ARM v7 instruction set architecture as the A9, but it will feature DSP and NEON SIMD extensions, a VFPv4 folting point unit, hardware virtualization support, as well as an integrated low-latency level-2 cache controller that can pack up to 4MB of memory.

“With our upcoming Cortex-A15 processor, we are definitely moving closer to the day when your smartphone or tablet can act as a primary computing device.

“You can simply hook the smartphone or tablet up to an external monitor to watch a movie and presentation, while linking a mouse and keyboard via Bluetooth to work on an Office doc,” said James Bruce, a mobile marketing spokesperson at ARM, in an interview with the TG Daily website.

However, when it comes to the server space, ARM is a lot more confident and believes that its RISC-based processors should find their way into an increasing number of servers.

Bruce believes that ARM's main advantage in this market segment resides in the low power consumption of the architecture, while its 40-bit physical addressing should prove “more than sufficient for standard tasks such as serving web-pages or content hosting.”

The Cortex-A15 processor will ship in late Q4 2012 or early 2013, and ARM is right now working with its partners to integrate the A15 into server designs.