The new generation of ARM chips, just unveiled by the British foundation responsible for this architecture, promises important improvements performance, capacity and energy efficiency while performing the AI ​​acceleration tasks that all smartphones will need to have in the future.

ARM licenses its designs to hundreds of manufacturers who use them as the basis for all types of chips. Its importance is capital in the technology industry because its architecture is present in billions of mobile devices, embedded devices, data center servers or personal computers from Apple and also from Microsoft and its partners with the recent development of Copilot+ PC.

Its relevance reaches an absolute level in smartphones, as it is present in 100% of those sold on the planet. That’s why any change in its catalog is important, such as the update it presented at the doors of Computex 2024, where its executives will surely introduce it.

New ARM chips

It was announced by a British company new product lines for CPUs, GPUs and options for manufacturers to license separately or in one package. In this way, ARM Compute Subsystems for Client (CSS for clients) includes the latest Cortex Cortex technologies, Inmortalis graphics, Corelink System Interonnect and ARM’s System Memory Management memory system.

In terms of chips, we have the following new features:

CPU Cortex-X925. ARM’s new flagship CPU delivers up to 36% increase in single-threaded performance, up to 50% higher TOPS for overall AI performance, and 41% faster time to first token when running on a tiny-L AI model named (Q4) compared to the current Cortex-X4.

ARM says these new CPU cores are based on the architecture ARM v9.2 and are ready for production on a 3nm process node. They support single-core processor speeds of up to 3.8 GHz, although ARM has particularly highlighted everything related to AI, it has not announced new neural processing units.

CPU Cortex-A725. One step below the previous performance, it offers a 35% efficiency improvement over the previous generation Cortex-A720. It should be kept in mind that AI acceleration takes a lot of resources and increases consumption.

Immortalis G925 GPU. GPU “higher performance and efficiency” to date, according to ARM, with 10 graphics cores (or more). In graphics applications, it is 37 percent faster compared to the last generation G720, with improved ray tracing performance on complex objects by 52 percent, and AI and machine learning workloads improved by 34 percent. And all this with 30% less energy.

As an added benefit for mobile game developers, Unreal Engine Lumen ray tracing is now supported in Immortalis. It’s unclear whether this alone will be a big enough incentive for other game developers to add ray tracing to their mobile games. Inmortalis is designed for high-end smartphones.

GPU Mali-G725. It can scale between 6 and 9 GPUs, offers the same API level support as Inmortalis, and is aimed at premium phones.

GPU Mali-G625. It varies from 1 to 5 cores and is a development aimed at basic mobile phones and other devices such as smart watches.

The new ARM chips will be the basis for a new generation of mobile phones that will arrive in the coming months. With a new licensing program that will add Cortex-X CPUs and Inmortalis GPUs, this combination is expected to expand among manufacturers.