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Earlier this week, ARM revealed details on its next-generation A57 and A53 SoC processors. Successors to the current generation Cortex-A15, the Cortex-A50 series brings the ARM architecture into a 64-bit capable processor that can be used in a much broader range of devices — from smartphones to data center workhorses. The Cortex-A57 specifically is the series’ flagship, and will be a serious entry into the server market.

The Cortex-A57 is essentially the Cortex-A15 with 64-bit registers, 64-bit memory addressing, and various low-level tweaks. Along with error correction and TrustZone hardware support, the improvements lend themselves well to server adoption. The processor supports ARMv7A and ARMv8 ISAs (which means that it can run both 32-bit and 64-bit code), virtual 44-bit physical addressing, and hardware virtualization support.

Further, it is a 3-wide, 8-issue design with a 15+ stage instruction pipeline. A wider NEON SIMD engine and IEEE-754 double precision floating point unit are also present on this next-generation ARM architecture. The A57 has a 48KB data cache, 32KB instruction cache, and a L2 cache (512KB-2MB) shared between four CPU cores. When the CCN-504 Cache Coherent Network is taken into consideration, up to 16 CPU cores can access between 8MB and 16MB of shared L3 cache (depending on implementation).

The interconnect also links the cores to the memory controller, network interface, and virtual IO — such as USB, SATA, DSP (digital signal processors), and PCIe. ARM has brought support for its big.LITTLE configuration, which allows the pairing a multiple Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 processors connected by the CCN-400 cache coherent network. That allows the device to dynamically use either the higher-performance A57 or the lower-power A53 (similar performance to the 32-bit Cortex-A9 with in-order, 8-stage pipeline) depending on the current workload.

On the performance front, Cortex-A57 will be approximately three times as fast as current (Cortex-A9 based) generation smartphones with similar power draw to the older chips (all else being equal). ARM expects the chips to hit higher frequencies than ever before, and an optional Mali T67x GPU can be paired with the CPU cores. Process nodes from 28nm to 14nm will be supported, and in 2014 you should see chips using 28nm to 20nm process nodes.

Compared to the Cortex-A15 SoC that is just starting to appear in tablets and Chromebooks, the A57 will offer up a performance increase of around 20%. Further speed improvements will be realized when working with 64-bit software and having access to more system RAM as well. The tweaks to the architecture along with a smaller manufacturing process (and accompanying higher clock speeds) are responsible for the performance boost.

Right now, the Cortex-A15 has proven itself a decent competitor to Atom — especially the older chips. As Intel moves to out-of-order execution (OoOE) with its future Atom processors, as well as flexing its manufacturing node advantages to deploy ever smaller processors with more cores, it will be interesting to see where the Cortex-A57 stands.

Pure performance aside, the Cortex-A57 boils down to an interesting take on a server chip from ARM. It will increase the capabilities of ARM-based servers by allowing it to take on more serious and “big data” workloads in data centers without abandoning its low power directive.

Quite a few companies have announced their intentions to produce server hardware based on the new Cortex-A57 processor. AMD and Calxeda have both talked about using the next-generation ARM SoCs to power high-density servers designed to host public and private cloud services (such as web hosting, cloud services, big data analysis, and internal enterprise applications) while drawing relatively little power.

Broadcom, Samsung, and STMicroelectronics also have plans for A57- and A53-based hardware. On the software side of things, popular Linux distro developers Red Hat and Canonical are the main companies driving support for 64-bit ARM software, which should ensure that Linux-based servers are ready to run on the next-generation processors.

ARM processors stand a competitive chance at the data center level where racks of servers drawing power can add up to massive power bills, and performance-per-watt efficiency is essential to companies that offer cloud services making money. As the ARM architecture’s first major foray into the server market, 2014 will certainly be an interesting year for low-power servers.