By Jim McGregor, EETimes (May 28, 2021)
Just over a month after refreshing its Neoverse infrastructure line of CPU cores, Arm released a flurry of new products aimed at PC and mobile applications. In its largest IP product release ever, Arm released complete families of CPU, GPU, DSU, and interconnect IP as it continues to sync up releases across product lines to what it calls “Total Compute solutions.” In fact, the only major computing core family that did not receive an update with this release is the newest family of products, the Ethos NPUs for machine learning acceleration.
New Arm Cortex CPUs
The entire CPU lineup is being refreshed with new Armv9-based products with significant improvements in performance and efficiency. The most important feature that Armv9 adds is the second generation of Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE2) which is an upgrade to Arm’s original Neon SIMD extensions. Updates to Neon and the addition of SVE2 can deliver much faster performance on machine learning workloads and other parallel workloads. Arm also rolled up a series of improved math and security features described in later versions of Armv8 instruction set releases. All future Arm Cortex CPUs will implement SVE2.