We have learned that ARM's strategy beyond the Cortex A9 dual core includes some low power server parts. The company believes that its products will get so powerful that this quad core with up to 2.5GHz clock will be enough for some low power servers.

You can just imagine how low the TDP of these chips going to be and let me remind you they run Linux just fine. Since most of the server market likes Linux they should be just fine, but of course no Windows support at least not for the time being.

When it comes to the specification the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor has an out-of-order superscalar pipeline with a tightly-coupled low-latency level-2 cache which can be up to 4MB in size.

The server version has four cores, 1.5GHz to 2.5GHz core clock and the company promises high performance for both single- and multi-treaded applications as well as virtualisation support. Remember this is a silicon on chip and will come with core logic and graphics on the same package.

Since this is a 28nm or 32nm part, you should expect to see most of them in 2012 but some chips might have a chance to show its face in late 2011. Globalfoundries is very close to ARM and they might be the first guys to have it, but we would not forget about TSMC as a viable candidate. Samsung is reportedly being late compared to the first two fabs we mentioned.

Since it only realistically comes in 2012, it will be a while before Cortex A15 really starts to eat into Intel / AMD server market numbers, if at all.

More at ARM's official Cortex A15 website, here.