ARM, the company you’ve probably never heard of that designs processors and GPUs for most of the smartphones on the market, has revealed its new products at Computex Taipei 2016.
ARM’s Cortex-A73 CPU and Mali-G71 GPU are said to be more powerful, more efficient and will be able to deliver better virtual reality experiences for smartphone users than the company’s existing CPUs and GPUs.
So let’s take at the claimed performance increases, starting with the A73 processor.
According to ARM the Cortex-A73 processor will offer a 30% increase in sustained performance and power efficiency compared to the previous Cortex-A72 processor.
The 2.8GHz clock speed increase is rather substantial as well, but we figure this will only be reached in applications that call on that sort of crazy clock speed.
ARM has also said the Cortex-A73 will support its big.LITTLE Technology and can be paired with the Cortex-A53 and A35 processors. The upshot of this is that manufacturers can pair this crazy processor with one that isn’t as nuts, and help conserve battery when you’re just texting mates but cruise through demanding games when necessary.
Speaking of games, the Mali-G71 is said to be powerful. How powerful? Well, according to The Verge ARM has said that performance of the Mali-G71 is comparable to an NVIDIA GTX 940M. That’s a bold claim, but wait! It gets even bolder.
The report goes on to say that the GPU will capable of reaching a UHD resolution (3 840 x 2 160p) and will support a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. That’s insane for a phone, as it’s on par with what desktop systems offer these days.
At this point we do need to point out the elephant in the room: all of this performance is dependent on original equipment manufacturers actually using these components.
For example, Qualcomm would need to swap its own Kyro-based processors in its Snapdragon chipset out to use ARM’s instead, something they may not jump at doing since its Snapdragon 820 chipset is the second best we’ve seen, only outdone by Samsung’s Exynos used in the Galaxy S7 edge.
There are a lot of factors at play here, but we would be lying if we said we weren’t a little impressed at how far the development of mobile technologies has come, and how quickly it’s catching up to the performance of PCs.
ARM expects to start the manufacturing process at the end of this year with a view to having smartphones that use the tech on the market as early as next year.
[Via – The Verge]
