Arms race
When ARM chose to take the fight to Intel by developing chip designs that could be used in larger computing devices, it must have known it was going to get into the kind of processor arms race (no pun intended, sort of) that Intel has had with AMD for years.
At this year's MWC we had Intel throwing down the gauntlet and saying it was going to out-perform all processors based on the ARM instruction set. We probably won't be able to put that claim to the test until Medfield emerges in 2011, but ARM isn't about to sit on its hands until then.
While ARM was keen to focus attention on its designs - like Cortex A9 and Mali - that we can expect to see this year at MWC, it also revealed some more details on its Eagle design, which will be its highest performing core yet when it makes an appearance sometime in 2011, probably at a similar time to Medfield, although it's not expected to appear in phones ‘til 2013.
The Eagle core is expected to deliver more than double the performance at less than double the frequency. One of the reasons for this greater efficiency will be the move from a 40nm to a 32nm manufacturing process.
We understand that SoCs are moving into an era of two, separate manufacturing processes for each design; a low-power (LP) one, designed for optimal power efficiency where battery life is most important, and a performance-optimised (G) one, for notebooks, tablets, etc. So don't be surprised to see a low-power derivation of Eagle.
