Slate of ARM chip designs could make phones bigger players on the edge

Arm’s new product designs are the Cortex-A78 CPU, Mali-G78 GPU, Mali-G68 and Ethos-N78 NPU.

Also debuting via the Cortex performance-customization program is the Cortex-XI CPU, which will have a 30% increase in peak performance over the Cortex-A77. The XI is ARM’s most powerful CPU and the first of its CPU designs in the performance customization program.

The company claims that the Cortex A-78 design delivers a 20% sustained performance increase over its A-77 mobile predecessor. An A78 chip will enable “multi-day immersive 5G performance… with greater on-device machine learning performance.”

The Mali-G78 GPU, based on the recently introduced Valhall architecture, will perform 25% better than the preceding G77. It can support 24 cores, and its architecture will extend phone battery life, according to ARM. Designs for the Mali-G68, which supports up to six cores, also was announced.

The Ethos-N78 neural processor design is billed as delivering 25% greater efficiency over the N77 while providing deeper on-device machine learning capabilities. Configurations range from one TOP per second to 10 TOP per second.

In February, ARM introduced designs for its new Cortex-M and Ethos-U chips.

Arm’s new designs are central to its bid to remain a key player in the market for processors used in power-constrained edge devices like cell phones and tablets, while long time licensees like Nvidia are pushing Arm’s architecture into data center deployments with multi-core GPUs that are more power-efficient than x86-based chips.

Article Topics

5G  |  Arm Holdings  |  chip  |  device edge  |  Nvidia  |  smartphone