> Qualcomm are sampling their new chip soon, it's another dual core
> but it goes up to 2.5 GHz. It's also a new microarchitecture

Nice. Three days before that announcement I had just been talking about Krait having been announced for sampling for Q2/2011 right here in this thread.

> it sounds like it'll be something similar to the Cortex-A15.

At least regarding Dhrystone performance it's estimated to be a bit below (estimated) Cortex-A15 performance.

> Currently the A9 is in PPC G4 territory performance wise.

G4 exists between 350 MHz and 1.7 GHz (2.0 GHz overclocked), which means a factor of about 5 to 6 from slowest to fastest, so I think you should specify your statement a bit more. So which clock rate in G4 do you think a 1.2 GHz (which I think is the current max) Cortex-A9 roughly resembles performance-wise? After all, beating a 350 MHz G4 would be a no-brainer even for Cortex-A8 ;-)

> The 1.8GHz A9s should put them up against the G5s

That's a bold theory. I think it should be hard for a 1.8 GHz Cortex-A9 to beat even a 1.6 GHz G5 (the slowest of the bunch) let alone a faster one performance-wise.

> it looks like ARM beating all the G5s could be maybe only a year away.

Beating a 2.5 or even 2.7 GHz G5 with a 2.0 GHz Cortex-A9 is definately not possible. First Cortex-A15 based chips are minimum 1.5 years away.