ARM has today unleashed its latest mobile chip solutions that will make their way to a majority of 2021’s flagship phones. First up is the new Cortex-A78 CPU, which is claimed to bring a performance boost of 20%. It is accompanied by the high-end Mali-G78 GPU and the slightly less powerful Mali-G68 GPU. Lastly, the company has also lifted the covers from the Cortex-X1 CPU that can be customized for top-of-the-line performance.
ARM Cortex A78-CPU
The ARM Cortex-A78 CPU is claimed to bring a 20% sustained performance improvement over the previous-gen ARM Cortex-A77 CPU. It is also said to be 50% more energy efficient compared to its predecessor, 8% less power-hungry for machine learning-based tasks, and will also occupy less space when used in accordance with the DynamIQ cluster (4x Cortex-A78 + 4x Cortex-A55) plan.
ARM Cortex-X1
As per ARM, the Cortex-X1 CPU marks the beginning of a new Cortex-X Custom program that will allow partner brands to work with ARM’s team for designing custom CPUs based on their demand. Essentially, the new initiative opens the doors for customizations to deliver the highest-end performance possible. ARM says the Cortex-X1 CPU will offer a performance gain of 30% over the Cortex-A77 design and a 2x improvement at ML performance among other benefits.
Mali-G78 and Mali-G68 GPUs
Alongside new CPUs, ARM has also announced a pair of new GPUs – the Mali-G78 GPU for flagships and the Mali-G68 GPU for sub-premium phones. Based on the new Valhall architecture, the Mali-G78 GPU is said to offer a 25% performance improvement, 15% performance density improvement, and 10% higher energy efficiency for gaming content over the Mali-G77 GPU.
The Mali-G68 is a cheaper alternative for non-flagship devices and offers support for 6 cores, compared to the 24 core support on its flagship sibling.
Source: ARM