Ahead of the Computex conference in Taipei where Intel CPUs will take the spotlight in a variety of new PCs, ARM has released its new CPU and GPU architecture: the premium Cortex-A75 CPU, mid-range Cortex A-55 and Mali-G72 GPU.
Although its brand is rarely presented in a consumer-facing manner, ARM is the company behind nearly all mobile processors. The British company, owned by Japanese telecom and internet company SoftBank, designs processors, as well as SoC infrastructure and software that are used by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, Samsung’s Exynos and Apple’s A-series chips.
The company’s new processors feature the usual efficiency and performance improvements, but are also designed specifically for onboard artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The new Cortex-A75 and A55 are the company’s first DynamIQ big.LITTLE processors, meaning its vendors will now have more options for customizing the amount and variety of cores. While ARM currently allows for designs that pair a cluster of big CPUs with a matched number of little cores, the new design allows vendors to create a mixed up cluster of up to eight big and little cores. For example, a chipset that calls on the company’s new designs could have three A75 cores and five A55 cores, or one A75 and seven A55s — all depending on the intended desires for power efficiency, performance and price point.
The combination of these flexible CPU clusters, says ARM in a blog post, along with its GPU compute technology, dedicated accelerators and its new ARM Compute Library “work[s] together to efficiently enhance and scale AI performance.”
The ARM Compute Library is an open-source collection of low-level software functions optimized for Cortex CPU and Mali GPU architectures that the company says can boost the performance of AI and machine learning workloads by 10 to 15 times on both new and existing ARM-based chips.
The ARM Cortex-A75 features a reported 22 percent performance improvement over its predecessor, the Cortex-A73, while the Cortex-A55 reportedly features the highest power efficiency of any midrange ARM CPU yet. The Mali-G72 GPU, meanwhile, has 25 percent improvement in efficiency relative to the G71.
The Cortex-A75 and A55 designs were released to vendors at the end of 2016, so the company expects to see new mobile devices powered by its new designs by the first quarter of 2018 — though it notes that some Chinese manufacturers may push out devices with the designs before the end of the year.
Source: ARM
Via: The Verge
Image credit: Socram8888 via Wikimedia
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