Arm has made big CPU and GPU chip design announcements today, which will impact the high-end smartphones coming in 2022. Making a move from the Armv8 architecture which has been around for years – they are graduating to the latest Armv9 architecture. This brings a huge jump in the overall performance and also assures bumped-up security and AI features.
This also gives the green flag to get the software ecosystem ready to bid goodbye to the 32-bit apps. The new hardware will not be limited to phones only – it will affect the laptop, smart TV and multimedia appliances market as well.
New Arm CPU designs
Arm is introducing three CPU designs for the coming year – the Cortex-X2, A710 and A510. The Cortex-X2 is a successor to the Cortex-X1, and the most powerful design out of the three.
Cortex-X2 promises 16-percent better performance compared to the Cortex-X1 having the same node and running at the same frequency. Arm has optimized the CPU, as the single-thread performance is 40-percent higher, and improved the machine learning too.
The A series gets a new design and brings improvements to its predecessors. The Cortex-A710 CPU is 10-percent faster than the A78 and also improves the energy efficiency by 30-percent.
In comparison, the Cortex-A510 is almost 35-percent faster than the A55, has 20-percent better power efficiency and boasts three times better machine learning capability. This will bring a considerable leap to mid-range and entry-level devices.
New Arm GPU designs
More than 1 billion Mali GPUs shipped in 2020, and Arm is upgrading the GPU suite to tailor every segment of the market. The leader of them all is the Mali-G710, which brings 20-percent faster and energy-efficient performance to the predecessor – along with 35-percent bump-up in machine learning apps.
The Mali-G610 is a sub-premium GPU based on the Mali-G710 architecture but has only one and six shader cores. It will come in handy for flagship killers who’ll look to undercut the high-end premium devices.
Then comes the Mali-G510 GPU, which has significant improvement over the outgoing GPU. It boasts almost twice the speed and 22-percent more energy efficiency – making it a staple for upcoming mid-range devices, smart TVs and set-top boxes.
Last in the announcements made by Arm is the Mali-G310, which impresses after the Mali-G510. Targeted more toward the budget devices, the GPU has a 4.5x time improvement in Vulkan performance and Android UI rendering improvement of almost double.
