Slate of ARM chip designs could make phones bigger players on the edge
Chip designer Arm Holdings Plc. has introduced its latest mobile chip design as well as a program through which buyers can tweak the performance of CPUs based on the Cortex-A design. Chips based on all of the new designs are expected to make phones more formidable edge devices.
In announcing the new mobile products, UK-based Arm said the convergence of marketable artificial intelligence and 5G telecommunications deployments mean phones need to be more powerful and efficient.
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
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