ARM eyes Intel turf with 2GHz multicore designs

From CNET News.com: Cambridge, England-based chip company ARM on Wednesday announced the development of dual-core, quad-core, and eight-core Cortex A9 processor designs, explicitly aimed at markets currently served by Intel's x86 chips and IBM's PowerPC.

"This is a huge departure from what we've done in the past", Eric Schorn, vice president of marketing for ARM's processor division, told ZDNet UK. "We really wanted to take off the handcuffs and see what could be done with performance, performance, performance."

The new designs, available in two variants optimized for low power consumption or high performance, are intended for use by companies building their own chips. ARM claims that the new processors, which can run at up to 2GHz, are up to eight times more efficient than Intel's low-power chips in terms of performance per watt, with the high-performance part running at five times the throughput of Intel's Atom chip for similar power levels.

The low-power part delivers twice the performance at a quarter the power, according to the company's published benchmarks.

View: Article @ Source Site