The gloves are off in the ARM vs. Intel battle, now that Marvell has announced a full-blown ARM server chip for cloud datacenters. The 40nm, 1.6GHz, quad-core ARMADA XP is aimed squarely at a market segment that Intel has seen strong performance from in the past few quarters, and Marvell's co-founder, Weili Dai, is clear about that, saying, "Marvell's introduction of a powerful solution for enterprise-class cloud computing applications is a very important milestone in the mobile Internet revolution."

The chip's specs are impressive, especially for something that runs at under 10W:

Up to 1.6GHz processing performance for each ARM v7 compliant core

16,600 DMIPS performance at less than 10 watts

"Heterogeneous multiprocessing" (SMP/AMP/Mixed) with "hardware-based Cache Coherence"

Up to 2MB system level two cache

64-bit DDR2/DDR3/DDR3L memory interface with ECC support at up to 800MHz clock rates

4 PCI-e Gen 2.0 units

4 enterprise class Gigabit networking ports

Up to 16 high speed Marvell SERDES lanes with multi functionality (PCI-e, SATA, SGMII, QSGMII)

Multiple USB ports

The ARMADA XP is based on the same custom, A9-class Sheeva PJ4 that powers Marvell's recently announced tri-core chip. As we mentioned in the tri-core chip coverage, details are scarce on the Sheeva PJ4, but we do know that it's a two-issue superscalar design that can do some amount of instruction reordering. This puts it in roughly the same league as the A9.

It's perhaps ironic that Sheeva is now attacking Intel directly, given that it was designed by the Xscale team that Marvell bought from Intel back in 2006. So Intel got out of the ARM business because it planned to move x86 down into ARM's territory. Four years later, the ARM unit that it sold off is moving ARM up into Intel's territory.

Cloud servers aren't the only market for this new part; ARM is also talking up some unspecified mobile applications as well. This would have to mean smartbooks and maybe tablets, because there is no way that this part is appropriate for a smartphone or even a portable media player. With all that I/O hardware, the ARMADA XP really makes the most sense in smartbooks, small home servers (NAS and media servers), and dedicated clients (media extenders). As far as smartbooks go, the 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo in the new 11" MacBook Air is rated at 10W TDP, and while Intel's TDP rating isn't really the same as Marvell's power number, if they're in the same ballpark, that gives you some context for this chip. It's a much more attractive smartbook option than the A8-based parts that were in the smartbooks we saw at this past CES. The latter just didn't cut it in terms of performance, but the ARMADA XP would be a huge step up. Of course, you'd sacrifice some battery life, but the experience would be better.