With only a few days left to the launch of the M6s, Meizu has been releasing teasers of the upcoming device daily. The teasers not only count down to the official launch but also tease one of the specs.

The teaser for yesterday focuses on the processor. In the image, Meizu reveals that the chipset will have ARM’s Cortex-A73 cores. The A73 was announced back in 2016. It offers a variety of performance and power saving improvements over the Cortex-A72.

For instance, the Cortex-A73 has about 10 to 15% performance increase alongside a 20% reduction in power consumption if it is built using the same node as the Cortex-A72.

If it is built on a smaller node such as the 10nm process, it provides a 30% increase in performance and a 30% reduction in power consumption. The Exynos 7872 hexa-core SoC which will power the Meizu M6s is built using the 14nm node process. While it won’t provide up to 30% increase in performance and power savings, it will at least not be lower than 15%.

On the other hand, the teaser for today teases the new navigational buttons for the Meizu M6s. The phone will ditch its physical mBack button for on-screen ones. Despite that, there are reports that there will be an option to activate a virtual mBack button that works just like the physical one.

To sum it up, Meizu has also began registrations for the phone on its official website. It is not unexpected that pricing and specification details are missing on the page.

READ MORE: Meizu Pro 7 Featuring Secondary Screen To Launch In India Later This Month – Report

Anyway, if you plan to grab a unit, head to the registration page and register. The Meizu M6s will be sold on the official online store, Suning, JD.com, and Lynx.

(Sources:, 1, 2)

The post Meizu Teases M6s’ Cortex A-73 Processor & Navigation Buttons, Begins Pre-order Registrations appeared first on Gizmochina.

ARM announced two new processor cores and one new GPU core earlier today which should power the upcoming smartphones and other gadgets by the end of 2017 / early 2018. The new Cortex A75 processor core succeeds the powerful Cortex A73 cores that’s found inside many high-end chipsets today. The Cortex A55 is one of the most awaited upgrades as it succeeds the super popular Cortex A53 core that’s found in millions of smartphones. There’s a new GPU announced as well, the brand new Mali-G72 succeeding the G71 core announced last year.

DynamicIQ 

While these are important upgrades, what’s even more exciting is the announcement of the new DynamicIQ, which has been in the works for the past few years. If you are wondering why it’s important, note that it is the next generation tech in the super popular big.LITTLE architecture that’s currently used by most of the smartphone chipsets in the market including Snapdragon and Helio SoCs.

Considering how the big.LITTLE architecture was announced around 5 years back, it was about time that we got an upgrade to the architecture better suited for new generation requirements. One of the major upgrades in DynamicIQ architecture is the ability to mix different CPUs in a cluster. At present, the big.LITTLE architecture supports multiple clusters but each cluster would have just one type of CPU. For example, if there are two clusters, you can have Cortex A72 in one cluster and Cortex A53 in another cluster. But you couldn’t have them both together in one single cluster.

That changes with DynamicIQ architecture. This means you can have multiple CPUs in one single cluster and the number of CPUs in a single cluster has been increased to eight from the previous four limit in big.Little. So, you can have an octa-core chipset even with just one cluster. In fact, ARM predicts that a number of mid-range SoCs could go for an octa-core single cluster design with multiple CPU combinations. For example, Cortex A75 and Cortex A55 could be used in 1+7 or 2+ 6 or 4 + 4 or even just 1 + 4 combinations. With the support for multiple CPUs in a cluster, you could have lots of combinations.

ARM further predicts one particular combination to be popular among mid-range SoCs — Cortex A72 and Cortex A55 in 1 + 7 combination. This particular combination improves single thread performance up to 2.41x and multi-thread up to 1.42x as compared to an octa-core Cortex A53 SoC.

Another important feature of DynamicIQ is the presence of a DynamicIQ Shared Unit (DSU) which houses the L3 cache, takes care of power management as well as ACP and Peripheral port interfacing.

Note that as of now, only the newly announced Cortex A75 and Cortex A55 support DynamicIQ.

Cortex A75

This is the next generation core that will power the flagships of late 2017 and 2018. The Cortex A75 builds upon the thermal efficiency of A73 and boosts the performance. So, Cortex A75 offers more than 20 percent improvement in performance in a number of scenarios as compared to last year’s Cortex A73. This is achieved while maintaining the same levels of sustained performance. Also, instead of focusing on increasing power efficiency, ARM seems to have focused on keeping the same level of efficiency as the A73 while improving performance.

The Cortex A75 core is not just meant for smartphones as there are a number of large screen devices that could use this powerful chip, like Chromebooks and convertibles.

Cortex A55

The Cortex A55 is a much better upgrade, offering up to twice the boost in performance for memory-bound tasks as compared to the old Cortex A53. But for typical CPU usage tasks, the new processor core offers up to 20 improvement in performance, much like the Cortex A75.  Efficiency is also given due importance as the Cortex-A55 comes with 15 percent improvement in power efficiency as compared to its predecessor.

Remember that both, Cortex A55 and Cortex A75 are built on the new ARM v8.2-A architecture and ARM adds that these CPU cores are specifically designed to handle new age requirements like AI and machine learning.

Mali-G72 GPU

The current generation Mali-G71 GPU is found a number of high-end smartphones like the Huawei P10 and even the Samsung Galaxy S8 powered by the Exynos 8895.

The Mali-G72 improves energy efficiency by up to 25 percent as compared to Mali-G71. ARM has also improved performance density by up to 20 percent. This essentially means that you can put more GPU cores in the same die area. This could translate into more cores being packed inside flagship smartphone GPUs. At present, the Kirin 960 uses Mali-G71 MP8 GPU (eight-cores) and Samsung’s Exynos 8895 comes with Mali-G71 MP20 (20 cores). The G71 and G72 GPU support up to 32 cores and we may finally see top-end phones using more GPU cores inside its SoC to boost graphic performance.

It may take a while for chipmakers to implement the new DynamicIQ architecture, but we can expect new smartphones with Cortex A75 and A55 cores sometime early 2018. Best case scenario would be late 2017, but we’ll have to wait and see if new chips can release that early.

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It is no longer news that the Xiaomi Mi 5C would launch soon packing an entirely new self-developed processor by Xiaomi. A recent leak had revealed that the Pinecone chipset that would feature on the Mi 5C has a CPU with Cortex-A53 cores in an octa-core architecture said to be as powerful as the Snapdragon 808 chip.

Now, if you think that isn’t a good one for 2017, do not despair as more information has emerged about the Pinecone processor which is billed to give Xiaomi some level of independence in choosing the chip crammed its smartphones in the near future. According to the info, there are two models of the Xiaomi Pinecone processor which would hit the market this year. The two models go by the model numbers V670 and V970 and the Mi 5C would launch with the lower V670 model. The V670 is said to use four Cortex-A53 large cores and four Cortex A-53 small cores. The GPU is composed of the Mali-T860 MP4 GPU with a clock speed of 800MHz. The V670 is also said to be using a 28nm manufacturing process.

On the other hand, the higher V970 model is said to come in the fourth quarter (Q4) of this year and has a core parameter comprising four Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores in an octa-core architecture. The CPU is said to have a minimum clock frequency of up to 2.0GHz and a maximum clock speed of 2.7GHz. The V970 is also equipped with a more superior Mali G71 MP12 GPU with a clock speed of 900MHz.

Read Also: Xiaomi Mi 5C To Feature Self-Developed Octa-core Pinecone SoC, Launching This Month!

The source also hints that the Pinecone processor with model number V970 would be produced using the same 10nm process as the Snapdragon 835 chip. Incredible, isn’t it? There is still more, the high-end Pinecone processor is also said to feature in the Xiaomi Mi 6s and Mi Note 3. We’ll be on the look out for more details.

(source)

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The Xiaomi Mi 5C has turned out to be one of Xiaomi‘s rumored device that just refused to meet with us. The device has been popping in and out of the radar, even finding its way into e-commerce websites Jingdong (JD.com) and Taobao but yet wasn’t released. Perhaps Xiaomi was waiting for the right time to unveil the first device that would carry its self-developed Pinecone processor. But it looks like we’ll finally meet the Mi 5C soon if the latest rumor we are getting is anything to go by.

Coming from research analyst Kevin Wang, is the revelation that the Mi 5C would indeed feature an octa-core Pinecone processor developed by Xiaomi.The processor would be based on the Cortex-A53 cores in a 4×4 arrangement which place it in the mid-range category. The analyst also hinted that the Mi 5C could be released this month. In addition, another tipster added his voice to the discuss by revealing that there is another SoC with the more powerful Cortex-A73 cores still in a 4 x 4 architecture which would be released later on.

Read Also: Xiaomi Mi 5C Gets China’s 3C Certification, Rumored to Launch in February

The Xiaomi Mi 5C had earlier been revealed to sport a 5.5-inch display with 2.5D curved glass, 3GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage, a 12MP rear camera, and 8MP front-facing selfie shooter. The device, which also goes by the codename Meri, will run on MIUI 8 based on Android Marshmallow 6.0. Earlier rumors had also tipped the device for launch this February, so we hope to finally get to meet the device soon.

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