Thanks to Apple, and a weak competitive effort from Intel, ARM is gaining a lot of attention and momentum. Not only the ARM processors power millions of iPods, iPhones, iPads, countless of headsets from all other phone manufacturers, Digital TV set top boxes, wireless routers and more. Rumors even suggest that Facebook may be replacing its x86 servers, powered by Intel and AMD CPUs, with brand new ARM-powered machines.
The Facebook infrastructure has to manage over 500M users worldwide, representing a leading example in how to deal with massive amount of data. If the rumors are true, the rest of the industry may start following the Facebook experiment, granting to ARM an unprecedented position.
So it’s with much interest that the industry followed the announcement of the new Cortex-A15 CPU, launched last week.
The processor is especially interesting as it introduces support for hardware virtualization platforms: the ARM Architecture Virtualization Extension standardizes the architecture for implementation of the hardware acceleration in ARM application processor cores while the Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE) technology provides a second level of MMU translation table so that each 32-bit virtual memory address can be mapped within a 40-bit physical memory range.
It doesn’t surprise that both VirtualLogix, just acquired by Red Bend Software, and Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) immediately announced their support for this CPU.
Even VMware, which is working on its own mobile hypervisor after the acquisition of Trango, expressed its interest for the new Cortex-A15.