On Wednesday, May 29, Arm Holdings, the British chip design company owned by Japan's SoftBank Group, unveiled its next-generation CPU and GPU designs for flagship smartphone AI capabilities, and will provide software tools that will make it easier for developers to run generative AI chatbots and other AI code on chips featuring Arm's architecture. Phones with the latest core design are expected to be available by the end of 2024. The latest generation of Arm CPU architecture, dubbed the Cortex-X925 CPU, delivers a 36 percent improvement in Geekbench single-core performance over the previous generation Cortex-X4, thanks to 3MB of private L2 cache, allowing for a 41 percent increase in AI workload performance.
Arm's new designs include a central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) optimized for AI work. These designs not only increase processing power, but are also optimized specifically for AI applications, with a view to enabling a smoother and more efficient AI experience on smartphones.Arm's technology has always been at the heart of the smartphone market, and now, with these new designs, Arm expects to further solidify its leadership in the smartphone AI space.
In addition to the hardware design innovations, Arm has also introduced new software tools that are designed to simplify the process for developers running AI applications on Arm chips. Developers can now more easily deploy chatbots and other AI code on Arm chips, which will undoubtedly accelerate the development and deployment of AI applications.
Photo: ARM Cortex-X925 performance boost (Source: WSJ)
Additionally, Arm has changed the way it delivers its products. In the past, Arm delivered technology primarily in the form of specifications or abstract designs that chip companies needed to translate into physical blueprints. Now, Arm works with partners such as Samsung Electronics and TSMC to provide physical design blueprints ready to be used in manufacturing, which greatly accelerates technology adoption.
There are also analysts who say that this is the biggest upgrade to date to Arm's “largest core” (CPU Core), which will bring huge performance improvements to the next generation of smartphones, especially faster response times. For example, the new core has a significantly higher clock speed of 3.6GHz, compared to the current Cortex-X4's maximum speed of 3.4GHz, and uses a more advanced 3nm process technology.
Arm also announced the Cortex-A725 mid-sized core, an iteration of the current Cortex-A720 mid-sized core, the A725 will be 35% more performance efficient than the previous generation A720, a mid-sized core that is expected to be the workhorse for most tasks on high-end smartphones.
In the past, Arm has mostly provided intellectual property technology in the form of specifications or abstract designs to major architectural competitors such as Apple and Android phone chip suppliers Qualcomm and MediaTek, which the chip companies needed to translate themselves into physical blueprints for their chips. And for its latest products, Arm will work with Samsung and TSMC to provide physical design blueprints that can be directly manufactured. By providing more optimized hardware designs and more efficient software development tools, Arm is helping the industry move toward a smarter and more efficient future.
