

ARM unveils next-gen, 2.5GHz Cortex-A15 processor - logicalstack
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/ARM-CortexA15-MPCore/

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nl
Arstechnica has a great write up:
[http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/arms-eagle-
has-...](http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/arms-eagle-has-landed-
meet-the-a15.ars)

Interestingly, Ars says it's a laptop and server chip, not really aimed at
ARM's traditional embedded market.

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paulitex
Tablets, likely, laptops very unlikely - neither Windows or OSX run on ARM
(which together make up over 98% of laptop OS market share
<http://gorumors.com/crunchies/operating-system-market-share/>). I suppose
Windows 8 and OSX 10.7 could be out before 2012 and ported, but I wouldn't bet
on it....

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jsz0
Is there any good reason to sacrifice any significant amount of battery life
for performance in a tablet class device at this point? I think consumers will
find the happy medium of device battery life (full day for SmartPhones, couple
of days for tablets) and CPU evolution will need to be more incremental to
meet those demands.

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sprout
Honestly, I don't need a computer more powerful than my Motorola Droid. If
someone could make one of those that had the battery life of a feature phone,
I'd take my Moto Droid any day of the week.

(Actually, I don't see why you think that tablets should have multi-day life
expectancies. I'm almost always using them in areas where there are plugs. My
phone on the other hand almost never leaves my pocket. )

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rakkhi
"Honestly, I don't need a computer more powerful than my Motorola Droid. "

How can more performace ever be a bad thing, things you have not even imagined
or been invented yet to do on a mobile because the performance is not there
yet. E.g. things that I know: 3D video recording and photography, great
performance augmented reality, instant search with social network and location
data built it, HDR video recording.

I don't even know what I don't know...

And its not even multiday - I would love my iPhone to be double the
performance and 8 hours non stop video play. That would be awesome, nothing
more frustrating than being stuck on a train with a mobile that has run out of
battery, only so long you can stare at the hot chicks :)

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_delirium
There's probably things in theory you can do with it, but in practice I really
haven't found a need for more performance in the past 5 years or so. I have a
low-powered, old laptop and a full-powered, newish desktop, and I really don't
run into anything I want to do on the laptop but can't. Admittedly, I don't
play much in the way of recent games, so that would be one possible use.
There's scientific computing, but I run that all on remote servers or by
spinning up VMs in the cloud these days. I just haven't run into much of
anything else that needs the CPU cycles. In retrospect, I should've bought a
lower-powered desktop machine!

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rakkhi
Each to their own I suppose, I have a few laptops generally replace them every
2-3 years. Currently an Alienware M11X and a Acer 1215N. Even for "just"
email, browsing, reading I really like the "instant" feel from the newer core
2 duo processors and an SSD.

I also occisionally fire up a bit of Starcraft 2 so the M11x is great for
that.

I use an older computer at work and it is really painfull waiting for it to
load apps and even Firefox - ultimately it is only a few secords but that is
annonying to me.

For my phone the iphone is brilliant but battery life is a real issue. I read
on it all the time (walking, trains, tube, waiting in line). Occasional game
and youtube video also. Extra battery would be great espeically when I'm on
holiday or weekend break or just have played a few videos and haven't had a
chance to charge it all day

The performance is fine at the moment but I would love it to be faster - those
apps to launch instantly, multitask instant, youtube vids play in HD with no
lag and the ability to do more on it e.g. take HDR video, compress and edit
movies I take on my camera, play full 3D games with great graphics e.g.
upcoming Sword.

You can keep your 5 year old machine, but I am really looking forward to the
Dual core ARM processors - thats why I own share in ARM and Qualcomm :)

~~~
_delirium
Hmm, the SSD is a good point. I don't think my interactive desktop usage is
very often CPU-bound, which is one reason I don't notice much difference
between the older and newer machines I own. But an SSD might make some
difference, because I'm guessing some stuff (esp. app startup) is I/O-bound.

I do often take a software approach to speeding things up, though. For
example, my solution to Firefox taking a few seconds to start up was to switch
to Chrome. ;-) And thanks to the amazing JS compiler advances over the past
few years, my old laptop runs JS much faster today than it did when it was
new!

~~~
rakkhi
Yes buying an SSD was the single biggest increase to speed I have ever seen
from one component. I run SSDs on all my laptops and I would highly recommend
it. Have a 2TB USB for all my storage so 128 or 64gb SSD which is not that
expensive is fine.

Agree on software approach - I love Chromium and really struggle when forced
to use Firefox for work. IE I wouldn't touch with a 40 foot pole and thanks
the IE tab extension for Chrome I never need to :)

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noelwelsh
Intel should be worried. With support for 1TB of memory this seems like the
first ARM chip that can really make a dent in the server market. I expect the
big players with significant energy bills to be very interested in this.

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modeless
Supporting 1 TB of memory on a 32-bit system reminds me of the bad old days of
DOS extended memory. Are there any plans for a 64-bit ARM chip?

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noelwelsh
I don't know, but it's the obvious next step. There are certainly rumours that
ARM is going to go that way. I'm not plugged in to the chip manufacturer
gossip network but my guess is that ARM doesn't want to start an open fight
with Intel before they have

1) Tested the server market. A 32-bit chip has its limitations, but for things
like caches that are IO limited it is fine, and

2) Got their 64-bit architecture nailed down. I expect they don't want to give
Intel a long lead time to respond.

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mansr
When power is a major concern, and that is the applications ARM is targeting,
using a 64-bit system when 32-bit would suffice is counter-productive. A
64-bit CPU naturally requires more transistors and thus more power than a
32-bit one. There are other overheads (in OS etc) associated with a 64-bit
system. The difference may not be great, but for many applications it is a
cost with no reward.

Comparing to MIPS, they have had a 64-bit ISA variant for a very long time,
yet all the recent cores have been 32-bit as this is all their current target
markets require.

A full 64-bit system is really required only for HPC-type applications, a
domain currently owned by Intel and IBM. If ARM are interested in eating into
this market segment, it is most likely a very long-term goal, and obtaining a
foothold in the 32-bit server space would serve as a first step in that
direction.

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froydnj
Networking equipment is another place where 64-bit systems are useful. See
chip offerings from places like NetLogic and Cavium, for instance: their
multicore MIPS chips are 64-bit.

Databases are another place where 64-bit systems shine. Maybe you already
assumed that was included under "HPC-type applications", though. When I hear
HPC, I think number-crunching, not databases, though.

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listic
Where does one get a datasheet for one of those?

I was looking for the datasheet for previous models, but all I could find were
press releases.

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wmf
<http://arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a9.php>

There's quite a bit of documentation under the Resources tab. A15 docs won't
be released until later.

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listic
Thanks. Now I remember that it's Qualcomm's chips that I couldn't get
datasheets for:

MSM8660: Dual Core, 1.2 GHz, Q2 2010
([http://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2010/06/01/qualcomm-
sh...](http://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2010/06/01/qualcomm-ships-first-
dual-cpu-snapdragon-chipset))

QSD8672: Dual Core, 1.5 GHz, Q4 2010

