Cambridge-based ARM has fired its latest salvo at Intel in the mobile processor market, announcing a new 'Osprey' 2GHz multicore chip.
ARM is developing dual-core, quad-core and eight-core Cortex-A9 processor designs and making aggressive moves into the mobile, netbook and smartbook markets, with the company promising that gamers will see netbooks capable of running games featuring the latest 3D graphics early next year.
Specifically, ARM is announcing this week that it is currently working on the development of two Cortex-A9 processor designs "enabling silicon manufacturers to have a rapid and low-risk route to silicon for high-performance, low-power Cortex-A9 processor-based devices."
"This hard macro implementation operates in excess of 2GHz when selected from typical silicon and represents an ideal solution for high-margin performance-oriented applications," ARM said.
3D netbook gaming in 2010
TechRadar spoke with ARM''s Eric Schorn, VP of Marketing for ARM's processor division, who informed us that "the Cortex-A9 MPCore processor has already been widely accepted as the processor of choice for high-performance embedded applications across a broad spectrum of demanding consumer and enterprise devices."
ARM wants to move into those markets "traditionally occupied by proprietary architectures" and Schorn promises TechRadar that we should see consumer devices based around ARM's new potentially available as early as "the first half of 2010".
"We should see some interesting implementations of Osprey," Schorn told TechRadar, noting that he expects to see devices such as netbooks that are capable of running the latest 3D PC games at some point in the first half of next year.
