UK chip designer ARM has launched a new multicore processor range powerful enough to challenge Intel in portable devices of the class of ultra-mobile PCs.

The Cortex-A9 MPCore architecture can be made with between one and four cores delivering up to a claimed 8000 Dhrystone million instructions per second (DMIPs), or up to 16 times the power available in today's smartphones and set-top-boxes.

The idea is that device designers can choose one to four cores to match the speed, cost and power consumption required for an application.

Consumption will depend on how the chips are manufactured - ARM sells core designs that are surrounded by peripheral logic and manufactured by licensees as systems-on-a-chip. Highly-miniaturised chips will draw less power.

But many existing ARM designs work within a 250milliwatt power envelope, which is much less that of the most frugal x86 Intel chips.

The new processor comes in two versions: the single core Cortex A-9, designed for easy migration for existing device designs; and the A-9 MPcore, which can have up to four cores.

It has good operating-system support, including Windows CE and Linux, but will also be widely used in embedded applications. But for technology watchers the most interesting application are is in the ultra-portable space where increasingly powerful handhelds are poised to compete with increasingly compact PCs.

For more on this see our Test Bed blog How ARM could help Linux and wean Apple off toys