ARM Has Signed Two Licenses for Server Processors

It looks like ARM Holdings has made another step in the right direction while seeking to establish a presence on the server market.

Like so many other companies, ARM has to periodically hold conference calls with financial analysts and discuss earnings, outlooks, etc.

These calls tend to disclose certain business milestones and tactics that weren't known beforehand.

This time, the company ended up revealing some progress on the server market, while answering questions for those who attended the call.

Long story short, ARM has signed two licensing deals through which its intellectual property will be used in servers.

More precisely, the ARMv8-based 64-bit code-named Atlas design and the ARMv7-powered 32-bit ARM Cortex-A15 technology will soon start showing up in such systems (2013 most likely).

“We have 2 licenses that we put in the earnings release, one is driving a new lead partner for Atlas and one is a Cortex-A15. These are high-end processors, they're high-value products from ARM and therefore, more likely to be sold to larger semiconductor companies with more resource to take on those sorts of very large-scale development,” said Warren East, chief executive officer of ARM.

“We're certainly very enthusiastic about them. We're quite pleased with those design wins, and I think it will be very helpful for ARM's activity in service.”

It bears noting that two licenses don’t necessarily mean contracts with just two companies. In fact, several players are developing ARM servers: Applied Micro, Calxeda, Marvell, Nvidia and even Samsung.

That said, we may as well talk a bit about the architectures themselves, starting with the ARMv8 and its two execution states: AArch64 and AArch32.

The former introduces the A64 instruction set, for 64-bit processing (it was about time this came along), while the latter supports the existing ARM instruction set.

Meanwhile, ARMv7 boasts TrustZone, virtualization and NEON advanced SIMD. All of these are featured in ARMv8 too, some even improved.

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