ARM unveils Cortex-A17 processor, aimed at £150 smartphones & tablets

ARM has announced yet another addition to its bulging porfolio. After the Cortex-A12 late last year, the British company has just unveiled the Cortex-A17, which is set to replace the former in 2015 and is pitched as the "enhanced mid-range mobile and consumer solution" for next year, targeting $200 (around £150) devices.

TechRadar Pro spoke to James Bruce, mobile marketing lead at ARM, prior to the announcement and he confirmed that the IP attached to the product will be released by the end of Q1 2014 with the first products likely to appear this time next year, possibly to coincide with MWC 2015.

This shortened time-to-market approach is in stark contrast with the multi-year process that characterised the development of other previous solutions such as the Cortex-A8 or the six-year old Cortex-A9.

Bruce said that this "is a reflection of the mobile market with silicon partners and OEMs were cutting time to market in order to get products out as quickly as possible". As such, the go-to-market window for the A17 is shorter than a year although one might suspect that the first designs will be based on ARM's standard packages.

Better performance, more power efficient

The A17 is likely to perform on the same level as the A15 (60 per cent faster than the A9 is the official line) while consuming 20 per cent less power compared to the A9, all things equal; it means that the A17 will be better suited for mobile phones compared to the high performance but power hungry Cortex-A15.

It will run at up to 2GHz initially (with higher clock speeds available in subsequent iterations) and can work as designs of up to eight cores (two quad-cores).

Technically, the new part is similar to its immediate predecessor, the A12 and improves on it thanks with the addition of memory subsystem improvements, support for big.LITTLE and up to 8MB L2 ECC cache.

Together with the Mali-T720 GPU, the Mali-V500 VPU and the Mali-DP500 DPU, the Cortex-A17 completes ARM's mid-range multimedia solution.

ARM's mobile marketing lead also confirmed that 28nm will be the standard node for the A17 for a foreseeable future (at least until 2016) and that this part is likely to be the last high performance 32-bit part from ARM, hinting at the fact that 64-bit mainstream parts are likely to be announced between now and 2015.

32-bit will not go away overnight though with ARM expecting it to play a significant part in its portfolio until at least 2017.

• Check out our interview of Dennis Laudick, video president of partner marketing at ARM, about ARM's recent acquisition of Geomerics.

More details emerge about ARM-based AMD Opteron A1100 processor series

TechRadar Pro met with Suresh Gopalakrishnan and Ian Drew last week during an ARM/AMD briefing in London; Suresh is Corporate VP and GM of AMD's Server BU while Ian is ARM's CMO. The joint event symbolised the strong relationship between the two companies.

The global annonuncement of AMD's first ARM-based server SoC (system-on-chip), otherwise known as the Opteron A1100, happened end of January 2014 with Suresh confirming that the first samples would be shipped by end of March 2014 with full production happening by the end of the year.

Née "Seattle", this part, which is part of the top-bin (i.e. the fastest parts from a particular batch) is built around eight 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 2GHz and fabbed at 28nm. Other useful titbits include a TDP of 20W, 4MB L2 cache and 8MB shared L3 cache.

A well-connected SOC

Additional onchip features an intriguing additional Cortex-A5 system control processor plus an unidentified crypto/compression coprocessor, a DDR3/DDR4 memory controller and a raft of connection options (10GbE, SATA 3, PCIe Gen 3, I2C, UART) (but no support for Freedom Fabric).

Gopalakrishnan also confirmed to TechRadar Pro that more SKUs will be released in due time including one with four cores and/or running at slower speeds.

What's surprising is the size of the board housing these, slightly larger than a phablet according to AMD's Corporate VP.

Up to 12 of these boards, based on AMD's Open CS-A platform, can be fitted in a 1U rack, which means up to 504 in a common 42U full height rack (that's 4032 cores) with up to 32GB of RAM (max 128GB) and 8 SATA ports per board.

AMD declined to give details about the exact performance of the parts although experts put the estimated SPECint_rate figures at 80 (or 10 per core), that's up to 4x the performance of the x86-based Opteron X-series parts.

ARM's Ian Drew also added that most data centres are I/O constrained rather than performance constrained, a scenario that called for more targeted processors rather than the hitherto one-size-fits-all paradigm.

ARM ready to take on x86 in servers

He explained that the three reasons why ARM is now coming to data centres are tied to the rise of data, big and small, a wider industry support (from manufacturers and ODMs/OEMs) plus a massive improvement in efficiency.

ARM-based servers are expected to account for 25 per cent of the market by volume by 2019 according to Gopalakrishnan, a very conservative number that underlines AMD's reluctance to drum up its ambitions for ARM.

A development kit for the Opteron A1100 will also be available to select developers; it's a fairly bland-looking microATX motherboard that supports a standard PSU but ladden with useful applications.

Expect AMD's first ARM product to be readily available by year's end in the likes AMD's Seamicro servers as well as Boston's and HP's Moonshot range.

• Check out our interview of Dennis Laudick, video president of partner marketing at ARM, about ARM's recent acquisition of Geomerics.

Intel's next generation processor line-up leaked

Details of Intel's new processor line-up, codenamed 'Broadwell', have been leaked this week. Most likely to be aimed at the notebook and laptop market, smaller machines would set to gain the most from the changes in efficiency and Thermal Design Power (TDP) that the new Intel generation offers.

Broadwell splits the processor types into three: "H" high performance and "Y" and "U" for ultra low voltage.

"H" type processors (high performance) composed of dual chip and single chip types. The dual chip will include four CPU cores and the single chip two cores.

Dual chip processors will include the GT3e or GT2 GPUs and up to 6 MB of L3 cache. It will support up to 32GB of DDR3L memory at 1600mhz. The TDP will be set at 47 watts, and a new chipset, the 'HM97', will be introduced.

The "U" and "Y" series will be single-chip only platforms and house up to two cores with 4MB of L3 cache. "U" models will be able to support up to 16GB of DDR3L-1600 or 8GB of LPDDR3-1600 memory. Both chip types will have either 15 watt or 28 watt TDP.

High battery life

15 watt models of the "U" and "Y" series will come with GT3 and GT2 graphics, while Celeron and Pentium SKUs will be limited to GT1 graphics. 28 watt chips will only be available with the GT3 GPU and will only be offered as Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 products.

Possibly the most interesting in the Broadwell line-up are the "Y" ultra-low power SoCs. The parts in these will fit into a 4.5 watt thermal envelope and a 3.5 watt configurable TDP. The chips will have two CPU cores, GT2 graphics and up to 4MB of L3. The processors will work with LPDDR3-1600 memory and will support up to 8GB of RAM. With such a low power draw this configuration would give netbooks and tablets extremely high battery life.

The 'Broadwell' generation is set for release in Q2 of 2014.

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