Arm has announced its next-gen CPU and GPU cores for the next set of flagship processors. Both were unveiled at the manufacturer’s TechDay event and are successors to the Cortex-A76 CPU and Mali-G76 GPU.
The announcement of these new technologies will have a significant impact on the next-generation of processors from chip manufacturers like Qualcomm, Samsung, hopefully, MediaTek, Apple, Samsung, and maybe even Huawei‘s HiSilicon if their current predicament comes to an end. These chip manufacturers use custom-designs or stock versions of Arm’s instruction set for their own chipsets.
Cortex-A77
The Cortex-A77 improves upon the already impressive Cortex-A76 cores. Its core features are said to be mainly the same as the A-76. This isn’t a bad thing as the A76 was designed to be the foundation for this year and next year’s cores.
Nevertheless, the A77 brings a 20% IPC (instructions per clock) improvement in performance which is a really big deal. It also has a much better performance when it comes to machine learning. The new cores are expected to be built on the 7nm core just like the A76 too which means we won’t see a big jump in performance between this and previous generation unlike the switch from 10nm to 7nm.
[envira-gallery id=”255633″]Mali-G77
The Mali-G77 GPU is built on an entirely new architecture called Valhall (coined from Valhalla), following its adopted Norse-related nomenclature. Arm has ditched Bifrost which didn’t bring the expected gains in GPU performance.
Valhall is said to bring a new ISA and has a compute core design that tries to address the faults of the Bifrost architecture. Arm promises a 30% improvement in energy efficiency, a 30 increase in performance density and a 60% improvement for machine learning. Performance is said to be up to 1.4x better than the previous generation and power consumption is between 17% and 29% less (50% less than that of the MaliG72). However, the frequency will likely remain at 850MHz as the Mali-G76 GPU.
[envira-gallery id=”255630″]Arm says it expects SoCs with the G77 GPU will provide performance similar to that of Apple’s A12 GPU and with better power efficiency. That sounds really exciting and we can’t wait to see how true this is when the first set of SoCs launch next year.
We should actually expect to see it this year if Huawei’s Kirin 985 chipset is still on track but with Arm cutting off business with Huawei, we will have to wait for Samsung’s Exynos 9830 next year.
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