Arm has unveiled a new set of Cortex-A and Cortex-X CPU cores and a new generation of GPU designs at Computex Taiwan. The announcements include the flagship Cortext-X4, a mid-core Cortex-A720 and a lower-end Cortex-A520. The new CPUs also feature a DynamIQ Shared Unit (DSU), acting as glue logic for core clusters.
These blueprints will be marketed under the Total Compute Solutions brand, a collection of chip technologies designed to work together seamlessly. The idea behind the Total Compute Solutions brand is that Arm’s customers can license one package of cores according to their design and performance requirements and put them all into one SoC.
The new CPU clusters can have up to 14 cores divided between performance, mid and low (power-efficient) cores. This is the same idea as Intel packing its CPUs with performance and efficiency cores, except for mobile devices. While the default configuration might look something like one X4, three A720s and four A520s, some customers might require a different mix and Arm will be able to provide that on a single chip ensuring devices are better optimised and reach the consumer market faster.
Arm is hailing the X4 as its fastest CPU ever built claiming a performance increase of 15 per cent and power efficiency gains of about 40 per cent over the previous generation according to Stefan Rosinger, Arm’s director of CPU product management. It also features a larger L2 cache coming in at 2MB.
The performance benefits come majorly from optimisations for instruction fetch processes while the larger cache reduces memory traffic for larger bandwidth workloads. The X4 can also be manufactured using TSMC’s 3nm production process. Clock speeds for the X4 are expected to be near 4 GHz. As for the A720 and A520, you can expect clock speeds between 2.5 to 3 GHz and 1.5 to 2 GHz respectively.
On the GPU side of things, the company is announcing a fifth-generation architecture focussing on graphics performance with more advanced rendering pipelines. These new GPUs include the Immortalis-G720, Mali-G720 and Mali-G620.
While the three GPUs are basically identical in terms of design, the difference will be in the number of shader cores. The Immortalis-G720 will have 10 cores or more, Mali-G720 will have six to nine cores while the Mali-G620 will have five cores or less. Improvements include up tp 40 per cent reduction in memory bandwidth, 15 per cent more sustained performance on average and 15 per cent more peak performance on average as well.
In the News: OpenAI’s ChatGPT app comes to India and 33 more countries
