During its developers’ conference in Santa Clara, California, ARM said its new Cortex-A8 processor already has five licensees, including Freescale, Matsushita, Samsung and Texas Instruments, which are working with OEM partners to design the processor into their own smartphone chips.

The first phones powered by A8 are slated to reach market in 2007 and promise to give smartphones more enterprise appeal.

[A8] is going to enable a lot more enterprise applications and usage models of the phone, said Brian Carlson, core technology marketing manager for Texas Instruments, which will use the A8 to develop ultra-low power 3G modems and high-performance application processors.

Several mobile technology players, including software makers Microsoft and Symbian, also hailed the A8 as being key to giving mobile workers far greater capability than current technologies.

ARM director of business development Oliver Gunasekara said the A8 will double the performance of existing processors while using the same amount of power. We’re bringing PC-level performance into much lower power applications, he said.

TI expects A8 will enable a fourfold performance boost in high-end 3G smartphones, compared to the current ARM 11 processor.

The ARM 11s opened the door and the Cortex [A8] blows the door off, TI’s Mr Carlson said. Cortex takes performance up to a significant level.

While the A8 will give consumer phones greater high-def video and 3D gaming capability, Mr Carlson said enterprise applications are the key area where this technology applies first.

Primarily, it will give smartphones greater computational horsepower in order to run enterprise applications and enable more convergence on a device, Mr Carlson said

But the A8 also supports multitasking of Java applications and will be the impetus for real growth of Java programs on smartphones, Mr Carlson said.

One the most noticeable benefits to enterprises will be the ability for smartphones to use scalable vector graphics, Mr Carlson said. Until now, smartphone processors have reproduced the pixilated image of an application, such as a jpeg or PDF, and when users try to zoom in on a small phone screen, the image blurs.

The A8, however, has the processing punch to render those pixels directly onto the small screen, enabling higher-quality, higher-resolution smartphone graphics displays, Mr Carlson said.

Key to the A8 is a superscalar pipeline, which can execute multiple instructions simultaneously and deliver up to 2,000 DMIPS, while using less than 300mW (in 65-nanometer manufacturing technology).

In other words, the processor has a dual-pipeline that means it does twice as much work every clock cycle. It’s the first time in the mobile phone world that we’ve had this capability, Mr Carlson said.

Mr Gunasekara said the processor has been designed for systems-on-a-chip, which gives mobile chipmakers a small form factor. For other applications, such as set-top boxes, printers and routers, a system-on-a-chip means lower costs. For example, high-end printer chipmakers likely will see a 4x reduction in silicon cost, he said.

Initially, chipmakers will focus the A8 on high-end smartphone applications, Mr Gunasekara said.

Specifically, Mr Carlson said 3G smartphones are its OEM partners’ first target because they provide the bandwidth for computational- and graphics-heavy applications. TI’s OEM partners, which Mr Carlson declined to name, expect to launch high-end 3G multimedia smartphones in 2007.

However, Mr Carlson said TI is taking a case-by-case approach for other chipset applications based on the A8. We work in other areas as the business case justifies it, he said.

Because of the complexity of the processor, the A8 is aimed at 65-nm and 90-nm chipmakers, which means a limited market today. But during the next few years most chipmakers will transition to these manufacturing processes, Mr Gunasekara said.

Cambridge, UK-based ARM declined to give pricing details for the A8. Mr Gunasekara said it would be roughly in line with ARM’s existing 10-cent-per-unit royalty scheme. (He noted that royalties decrease with higher volume orders).

What I can say is the end cost is pretty negligible, he said.

Looking ahead, ARM’s R&D department is working on more security, better management and multiprocessing capabilities for its next version 8 architecture, Mr Gunasekara said.