The Cortex-A50 series will initially debut as A53 and A57 with the latter moving closer to Intel territory and a claimed performance that is similar to a "legacy PC".
Leading up until 2014, Intel will not be standing still either; but if ARM can deliver on its promise that especially the flagship model A57 can triple the performance of the Cortex-A15 processor, the company is setting a lofty goal that expands the horizon what future smartphone and tablet will be able to do.
The big news is the arrival of 64-bit support in ARM's designs which is necessary to provide it with an opportunity to break into new markets of desktop computing as well as server computing. While the company is not aiming to challenge Intel's high-performing x86 Xeon processors, ARM vendors believe they have an opportunity to use lower power processors to offer an efficient alternative for all those tasks where a Xeon processor's processing capability is not granular enough and effectively wasted.
In ultradense microservers, which aim for application areas such as networking, storage and bulk processing tasks in cloud environments, ARM vendors believe they can make a compelling business case. Intel will be standing against ARM vendors with its Atom S processor series.
Initial licensees of ARMv8 include AMD, Broadcom, Calxeda, HiSilicon, Samsung and STMicroelectronics. AMD recently announced that it will be designing ARM processors in the future as well.