In bid to upstage Intel, Arm boosts processor speed

From InfoWorld: Arm Holdings on Wednesday raised the clock speed of its Cortex A9 processor to 2GHz, with the aim of boosting application performance while drawing less power.

Arm designs processor cores that are licensed to chip makers. The processors can be found in billions of mobile devices like smartphones, and are making their way into devices such as netbooks. Known mostly for low-power consumption, Arm wanted to show their processors are scalable and can provide the performance needed to run demanding applications like multimedia.

Most Arm-based chips in the market are perhaps 1GHz or a little more, and there are not many 2GHz Arm processors, said Nandan Nayampally, director of CPU marketing at ARM. The latest processor is an attempt by Arm to show that it can raise clock speeds if needed.

"It's just changing the perception of Arm as being a low-cost, low-power processor not associated with performance. We're actually providing performance level very attractive to a large suite of applications," Nayampally said. The speed increase could be useful for Arm chips used in devices such as netbooks and multimedia devices at home, he said.

The dual-core Arm processor runs at 2GHz while consuming 1.9 watts of power. The processor delivered better performance than Intel's Atom N270 netbook chip operating at 1.6GHz, according to benchmarks provided by Arm. The speed could be scaled down to drop power consumption, Nayampally said.

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