Very often, you have seen the following terms in smartphone advertisements and brochures – Cortex A73, Cortex A53 and Mali GPU. For those interested in smartphone tech, these are the names of CPU and GPU designs by ARM, licensed to OEMs across the world. As new software and hardware come along every year, the CPU and GPU design need to be upgraded as well and fulfil the latest requirements of modern devices. Therefore, ARM has unveiled new CPU and GPU designs for upcoming devices this year.
The Cortex A75 and A55 are two different CPU designs for adoption on mobile devices. The A75 is a performance-oriented CPU architecture and is a natural successor to the current A73 design. The new design promises an increment of 20 percent in single thread performance over the current A73 while retaining the ability to deliver a boosted performance consistently. ARM also claims that it is comparatively energy efficient than the A73 design.
The Cortex A55 design is the polar-bear friendly iteration of efficient CPU designs this year. It is an evolution of the A53, but gaining up to two times improvement in performance than the old design in terms of memory-intensive applications. As for energy efficiency, ARM claims that the gains are 15 percent more than the A53. ARM says that designers can pick from over 3,000 different configurations, ranging from optional L2 and L3 caches, crypto, and NEON capabilities, through to up to eight cores per cluster.
Both the CPU architectures can be adapted for 32-bit and 64-bit configurations. They also support ARM’s latest DynamIQ technology, which can let chip developers choose their own core cluster configuration for providing performance and energy efficiency. Cluster counts now extend up to eight cores, allowing developers to implement 4+4, 2+6, 1+7, 1+3, or any other configuration inside a single cluster. Until now, SoC designers used the big.LITTLE architecture and multiple clusters to mix between different micro-architectures. These new CPU designs are built on the company’s latest ARMv8.2-A architecture,
Apart from the CPU designs, ARM also showcased the new Mali GPU architecture. Precisely known as the Mali-G72, the new GPU design will result in 25 percent enhancement in energy efficiency. The G72 also provides 20 percent better performance density, which means that chipset developers will be able to pack in more GPU cores in the current die design.
The new designs will be implemented in devices that could see the light of the day later in the year.
