By Paul Williamson, senior vice president and general manager, Client Line of Business, Arm
May 25, 2021 -- Over the past 12 months digital experiences have never been more important, with our personal devices connecting us to family and friends, our home devices helping us stay entertained, and business devices giving us the opportunity to work anywhere, any time.
Arm and its partners are at the forefront of compute and are committed to ensuring consumers have access to the devices they need, powered by the very best performance and security. Today we are driving a change in how systems are designed, delivering more capable and secure devices for everyone, and sparking the world’s potential.
Recently, we announced the Armv9 architecture, the foundation of the next decade of compute. We are working hard to bring Armv9 everywhere, maximizing performance through system level design. The advantages of secure, specialized processing mean Arm-based compute is establishing leadership beyond the smartphone market, leveraging the vast scale that the mobile ecosystem brings to create leading solutions in laptop, desktop, cloud and more.
Last year, Arm Cortex-X1 kickstarted the evolution of compute performance, and today we are announcing our first Total Compute solutions, which deliver on the three key pillars of Arm’s Total Compute strategy – compute performance, developer access and security.
By addressing these three pillars together, Arm can deliver uncompromised performance, security, scalability, and efficiency, accessible to millions of developers worldwide. These flexible solutions will empower our partners to unlock a new generation of immersive and interactive experiences across the broadest range of applications.
Total Compute solutions
Arm’s new Total Compute solutions take a holistic system-wide optimization approach across hardware IP, physical IP, software, tools and standards, providing the widest choice to Arm’s partners to meet diverse use cases and cost points across all Client market segments.
New experiences for the entire ecosystem can be unlocked, from AI-enabled interactive use cases designed for mobile to rich 8K content that will make you forget you’re watching TV. All of this with a secure foundation to build trusted digital services for the next decade.
At the heart of these solutions is Arm’s new suite of IP including the first Armv9 Cortex CPUs, stunning graphics capabilities with Mali GPUs and new CoreLink system IP – let’s take a closer look.
Arm Cortex CPUs: The foundation for Total Compute solutions
The new Armv9 CPU cores have been designed to deliver best-in class solutions for a wide range of consumer devices. Arm’s new CPUs bring the ultimate performance to laptops, faster user experiences on smart TVs, and continued efficiency for sustained mobile gaming and extended battery life.
Arm Cortex-X2 is our most powerful CPU to date, delivering 30% performance improvements over today’s flagship Android smartphones. Alongside peak performance, Cortex-X2 is scalable across premium smartphones and laptops allowing our partners to design purpose-built compute depending on market needs.
Arm Cortex-A710 is our first Armv9 “big” CPU, with a 30% energy efficiency gain and 10% uplift in performance compared to Cortex-A78. Through these performance and efficiency uplifts, users will have enhanced experiences while running demanding applications on smartphones for longer than they’ve done before.
We are also announcing the Arm Cortex-A510, our first high efficiency “LITTLE” core in four years, delivering 35% performance improvements and over 3x uplift in ML performance. This performance approaches those of previous generation “big” cores of only a few years ago, making it ideal for smartphone, home and wearable devices.
The backbone of the Armv9-A CPU cluster is a new DynamIQ Shared Unit, DSU-110, which enables a wide range of solutions across diverse market segments. DSU-110 offers scalability, uncompromised performance supporting up to 8 Cortex-X2 CPUs, security and ML features, while ensuring efficiency.
Finally, to support the ecosystem in their push for performance, all mobile “big” and “LITTLE” cores will be 64-bit only by 2023. In advance of that, we are already seeing our global partners work to ensure all apps will have 64-bit support by the end of this year, providing a seamless experience for consumers.
For more technical details on the new Armv9 CPU cores, visit our blog.
Arm’s new suite of Mali GPUs for every segment
The visual experience remains critical to how consumers interact with and enjoy their devices, so this year we are introducing our widest range of GPUs to complement the Armv9 CPUs in our Total Compute solutions.
Mali has been the #1 shipping GPU for the past few years. New this year is the Arm Mali-G710, our highest performing GPU targeting premium smartphones and the growing Chromebook market, delivering 20% performance improvements for compute intensive experiences, such as AAA high-fidelity gaming. Mali-G710 also offers a 35% machine learning uplift for a variety of ML-related tasks such as image enhancement for new camera and video modes.
Similar to last year, we are announcing an accompanying sub-premium GPU called the Arm Mali-G610. This GPU inherits all the features from Mali-G710 but at a lower price point, enabling our partners to rapidly address this growing market and bring premium use cases to a wider audience of developers and consumers.
Arm Mali-G510 offers the perfect balance of performance and efficiency, with 100% performance improvements, 22% energy savings for longer battery life and 100% ML uplift for mid-range smartphones, premium smart TVs and set-top boxes.
Finally, Arm Mali-G310, our most performant efficiency GPU, delivers the highest performance at the smallest area cost. Mali-G310 now brings the Valhall architecture and high-quality graphics technologies to lower cost devices such as entry-level smartphones, AR devices and wearables.
For more technical details on the new suite of Mali GPUs, visit our blog.
System IP for Total Compute solutions
Arm’s interconnect technologies are crucial to delivering system performance improvements. Our latest CoreLink CI-700 Coherent Interconnect and CoreLink NI-700 Network-on-Chip Interconnect work seamlessly with Arm CPU, GPU and NPU IP to enable system enhancements across the SoC solution. CoreLink CI-700 and CoreLink NI-700 bring hardware level support for new Armv9-A features, such as Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), and support increased security, improved bandwidth and latency.
For more technical details on Arm CoreLink CI-700 and CoreLink NI-700, visit our blog.
The world is moving to Arm
Our digital experiences have been shaped and defined by the premium smartphone, its software ecosystem and almost universal connectivity. This level of experience is now defining the standard for all consumer interactions and the last year has shown what can be possible through secure, purpose-built compute.
Our vision for tomorrow’s compute is driven by our desire to empower the ultimate digital experiences. Arm’s new Total Compute solutions are the first steps on our journey through the next decade of specialized processing.
Supplemental Quote Sheet
King:
“Arm’s new Total Compute solution is a big step forward in processor and system design. This holistic approach will bring increased performance, power efficiency and a host of features that our players will value. We’re looking forward to avail of the new IP to deliver richer gaming experiences to our players worldwide, with higher fidelity graphics and gameplay performance, helping King to make the world even more playful.” Steve Collins, CTO, King
MediaTek:
“Mobile devices, from smartphones, tablets, to Chromebooks, have transformed the ways we interact, work, and learn. Arm’s Total Compute solutions bring exciting new advances to the mobile landscape with more compute performance, increased system efficiency, and stronger security for future devices. We look forward to continuing working with Arm to enhance next-generation user experience in entertainment, education, and productivity.” Dr. Kevin Jou, CTO, MediaTek
Samsung Electronics:
“Smart devices have become digital extensions of our lives that rely on performance, efficiency and security. With Arm's Total Compute solution based on its latest Armv9 architecture and enhanced lead partnership, Samsung's System LSI Business and Arm will open new possibilities for next-generation mobile platforms and we are excited about the transformation this will bring to the user experiences through our future technologies.” Joonseok Kim, vice president of SoC design team, Samsung Electronics
Unity:
“We’re excited to support Arm’s new Total Compute solution. This new solution represents a major step forward, and is setting the stage for even better performance for Arm-based devices. The close ties between our software and the underlying hardware will help Unity creators push their games and apps even further to bring more immersive and stunning experiences.” Scott Flynn, vice president of Platforms, Unity
Zoom:
“This past year has driven technology solutions and changed how people interact. We now require a greater need for security and intelligence at a platform level. The new Armv9 based Total Compute solution with enhanced security features and increased performance will enable a more seamless immersive experience for the next-generation of smartphone and laptop devices using Arm technology.” Eric Yu, Head of Hardware Partnership, Zoom
Additional Resources
- Listen to the Total Compute solutions podcast on Arm Blueprint here.
About Arm
Arm technology is at the heart of a computing and data revolution that is transforming the way people live and businesses operate. Our energy-efficient processor designs and software platforms have enabled advanced computing in more than 190 billion chips and our technologies securely power products from the sensor to the smartphone and the supercomputer. Together with 1,000+ technology partners we are at the forefront of designing, securing and managing all areas of AI-enhanced connected compute from the chip to the cloud.
