At its rather exclusive ARM Tech Day 2014 in Austin, the British company has given us more details on the future of its mobile efforts — in specific, its upcoming Cortex-A53 and -A57 CPU cores. ARM also said that, after passing the the $60 mark last year, the cheapest Android phones will be just $20 “in the next few months.” According to ARM, these cheap devices will cause the low- and mid-range smartphone and tablet markets to more than double over the next five years, resulting in almost 2.5 billion total mobile device shipments by 2018… and they’ll (probably) all use ARM chips.

First, let’s talk about those A53 and A57 cores. The A53, which should arrive in phones over the next few months, is ARM’s first 64-bit ARMv8 CPU core; it is a mid-range chip. The A57, which also uses the new ARMv8 architecture, should arrive in early 2015; it’s a high-end chip. As you can see in the graph above, ARM now expects the A53 to be around 50% faster than the Cortex-A7, at around the same power consumption. The A57 is again around 50% faster than the Cortex-A15, but it also consumes more power. It’s only when TSMC and GlobalFoundries move to 20nm and 16nm FinFET that Cortex-A57 cores will truly shine.

It’s worth pointing out that these new ARMv8 cores are fully backwards compatible with 32-bit code — and as you can see in the graph above, the A57 is still significantly faster than the A15 in 32-bit workloads.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410, 610, and 615 will use the Cortex-A53 CPU core, with the 410 due to hit the market any day now. The Snapdragon 808 and 810 will use both A53 and A57 cores in a big.LITTLE arrangement, but they’re not due until 2015 (and will probably use TSMC’s 20nm HPM process).

Along with power consumption and performance, the other corner of the mobile computing triforce is cost — and really, ARM scores so highly on all three metrics that it’s no surprise that it has completely dominated the mobile market. Other players, like Intel, might be able to compete in terms of power or performance — but at the end of the day, ARM’s strategy of licensing its IP to any company with a pulse was always going to win out. Case in point: In 2011, cheap-and-cheerful Chinese ARM licensees sold around 15 million tablet SoCs; in 2013, that figure was 100 million. To complete the picture, four years ago the ARM tablet market didn’t even exist — it was just x86 laptops.

And of course, as the price of SoCs continue to fall, the total size of the market continues to grow. If you thought the smartphone and tablet market was already big at around 1.3 billion devices shipped in 2013, you ain’t seen nothing yet (according to ARM and Gartner’s estimates, anyway). By 2018, the “smart mobile device” market (i.e. smartphones and tablets) could reach almost 2.5 billion total shipments. For comparison, PCs peaked at around 350 million per year in 2011 and 2012. ARM expects low-end smartphones to hit a $20 price point later this year, and there’s no reason that price reductions will end there.

All in all, things are looking pretty good for ARM Holdings — a small, British company that has just 2,000 employees and diminutive annual revenues of around $700 million.