ARM, the world’s biggest smartphone chip designing company, recently announced the launch of two new chip architectures that promise fast performance for phones. The first chip will arrive before the end of the year 2019. However, the company will not use it in phone designs until later.

 

The two chips the company announced are the Cortex-A77 CPU and the Mali-G77 GPU. They also have a new powerful and efficient machine learning processor. The Cortex-A77 will focus on overall performance improvement. It will also combine this with a 20% IPC performance improvement over the last generation. With some advanced hardware and software optimisation, the Cortex-A77 also has better machine learning capabilities.

 

 

ARM explained that most smartphones in the world don’t use a dedicated neural processor. According to ARM, about 85% of phones in the world today use Artificial Intelligence. They also run the machine learning workloads with only a CPU or a combination of CPU and GPU.

 

ARM says they have been able to improve performance by four times since 2013. The Cortex A77, therefore, boasts of more power efficiency and better raw processing performance.

 

The new technology should provide mobile gaming and mobile AR and VR experiences with some boost. The Mail-G77 GPU is a first from ARM based on the Valhall GPU design. It is expected to have a performance improvement of 1.4 times than the G76. It will also run machine learning inference and neural net workloads at a 60% faster speed. This means that it will help to conserve battery life with 30% more energy efficiency and 40% less bandwidth.

 

 

In a recent announcement, ARM said,

“Every new smartphone experience begins with more hardware performance and features to enable developers to unleash further software innovation. For developers, the CPU is more critical than ever as it not only handles general-compute tasks as well as much of the device’s ML computer, which must scale beyond today’s limits. The same holds true for more immersive untethered AR/VR applications, and HD gaming on the go.”

 

ARM says it already offers the Project Trillium in its machine learning processor. This is its heterogeneous machine learning platform that runs with the company’s CPUs.

 

The A77-based phones will definitely work faster and manufacturers will be looking to import this technology into their devices soon. However, it will vary from device to device.