Two big announcements came out of ARM’s tech conference in Santa Clara this week. First, it gave details and dates for its next-generation cores, and second, a mass group of its licensees went all in on supporting ARM-based servers.

ARM’s new A-50 cores will be a step up for mobile devices. They will be better, faster, low power chips. According to SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto, “Lower power is a big, big deal. Eventually it will bring 64-bit processing into the mobile device arena.” Low power means longer battery life, which is perfect for mobile, especially with the increase in application usage that have higher demands on handset capabilities. There will also be two lines, one for mobile and one for servers.

Applied Micro will be building a new chip platform using the new 64-bit cores, AMD came out with a similar announcement, and Dell showed off big data processing capabilities on some ARM machines right before the show. The challenge of getting ARM into the data center, according to Casaretto, is the whole concept of looking at a completely new architecture. Long-term, having software that runs on that alternative architecture is going to be a big factor in making that work. He said, “Enterprises are going to see that as something they want to embrace and move forward with it.”

Applied Micro CEO, Paramesh Gopi, stated in an email: “It is clear that the industry is moving to support 64-bit ARM for a new breed of cloud server.” Casaretto interpreted that statement to mean that the eco-system will be ready when Silicon is ready.

Facebook, AMD, Redhat and HP are just a few of the companies joining forces to start building software for ARM-based servers through Linaro. See the whole segment with Kristin Feledy and John Casaretto on the Morning NewsDesk show.