Looks very cool; the idea of having "big" and "little" processors on the same SoC is interesting. I wondering if this is a big win vs. just having a "big" processor that is frequently put into idle mode when not needed.<p>As a side note, does anyone else find the ARM naming conventions totally impossible to follow? I look at the list of ARM models (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_microprocessor_cores" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_microprocessor_core...</a>) and have no idea where to begin. The family/architecture/core scheme means you can have a single chip that is an ARM11 family, ARMv6 architecture, ARM1136JF-S core. How do people make sense of this?<p>As someone who's writing a library that I want to be supported across all (or most) ARM cores, I don't have any idea how many different chips I'd need to test against to get a representative sample. There are so many optional features (NEON, Thumb, Thumb-2, VFP, etc) that seems to be supported in various combinations across the different models. It's like a maze and I never have any idea how a new model I read about fits in.
Pretty creative stuff. I am looking forward to AMD building an eco-system around these things. My guess is that if AMD could deliver 64 bit ARM server chips and full programming documentation to support a robust Linux server OS architecture they could take a huge chunk of server share away from Intel based machines.<p>My reasoning is that people started migrating to AMD when they had a 64 bit x86 architecture and Intel didn't. That showed me that folks were willing to go with AMD if they provided something that Intel wouldn't (or couldn't). Given that ARM isn't bogged down by Intel's staggering licensing challenges (chipsets, busses, instruction sets, etc) this suggests a very interesting couple of years ahead.
It sounds like A53 will start at 1.3 Ghz, and A57 will end at 3 Ghz. A 3 Ghz ARM CPU. Interesting:<p>"For those who are still looking for gigahertz performance numbers Hurley sais]d that new A-50 family will deliver performance ranging from 1.3 gigahertz to 3 Gigahertz depending on how the ARM licensees tweak their designs."<p><a href="http://gigaom.com/2012/10/30/meet-arms-two-newest-cores-for-faster-phones-and-greener-servers/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/2012/10/30/meet-arms-two-newest-cores-for-...</a>
Any Intel employees in the crowd? What's the level of worry surrounding ARM these days?<p>Given Intel's high levels of competitive paranoia, news like this must have people fairly worried. Not to mention the explosive growth in adoption of the ISA over the past few years.
I wish they would release the architecture reference manual to the public... all we have is the instruction set right now. Not enough to do bare metal/os work.
I don't believe these will be the first 64-bit ARMv8 CPU cores. Doesn't that honor go to Applied Micro's X-Gene SOCs? They'll ship a lot sooner than 2014.