ARM has long been rumored to have designs on the HPC market, and last week they made their intentions clear by disclosing details of their 2.5 GHz Cortex A15 processor, codnamed “Eagle.” An EE Times article described the A15 as a 2.5 GHz superscalar processor with eight-way multicore capabilities and multiprocessing support:
From here on up, the Eagle is clearly aimed not at advanced smartphones or mobile media devices, but at the network infrastructure, server, and cloud-computing space. To begin with, the A15 architecture is designed for big-machine problems. The total address space is 1 terabyte, far in excess of the needs of mobile or embedded computing.
While ARM provided few technical details, they noted that A15 performance would be about five times that of the previous top-of-the-range Cortex A9. And if they can deliver, I’m thinking this kind of performance combined with low-power requirements might just be the ticket for datacenters of the future.
