ARM Provides Initial Information on Eagle Architecture for Future Smartphones

ARM based processor has been monopolizing smartphone market and may soon be entering much power hungry MID (Mobile Internet Device) and even entry level notebook market. As some of you may wonder what secret weapon other than the 2GHz Duo-core Cortex-A9 based architecture that will be used as a new entrance to the market being monopolized by Intel Atom and other X86 based processors, the recent presentation during Globalfoundries fab tour by its president, Tudor Brown has disclosed some initial details of next generation Eagle architecture that is expected to hit the market by 2013.

Targeted mainly for smartphone and high end handheld products, the new architecture will emphasize much on higher clocks speed with multi-core design. Besides, it will be enhanced with built in graphics engine which is crucial as the multimedia centric applications have become increasingly important in mobile computing especially in end consumer market. Not to be lacked of, a hardware based security encryption engine will need to be included so that the usage can be extended to enterprise and corporate world on top of end consumer segments. No doubt that all these integrations will actually bring up the power consumption which is used to be a strong point from ARM, and so a newer and smaller process technology with 28-nm process technology, or even 22-nm by that time will make it much more power efficient for mobile devices without compromised by these new feature sets.

Since ARM only provides IP (Intellectual Property) and reference designs to its licensees such as Samsung, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments but not really manufacturing the silicon, it may take additional year for them to build and so do expect to wait at least after 2014 before the actual product is available.