Computex 2017: ARM Cortex-A75, Cortex-A55 and Mali-G72 GPU unveiled

According to the company, the Cortex-A75 offers 16 percent more memory throughput than its predecessor.

Importantly, these new CPU designs are built on the company’s latest ARMv8.2-A architecture, meaning that we won’t see these new cores paired up with existing ARMv8-A based CPUs, such as the Cortex-A73 or the A-53. And pretty much, it’s exciting to unleash another generation of devices with more things they can do.

The A075 CPU core is definitely a big take on pushing chipsets towards the AI direction. For example, a chip with one large core and seven small cores could use the smaller cores for ongoing computation tasks and the large core for performance-intensive applications. While ARM now allows for designs that pair a cluster of big CPUs with a matched number of little cores, the new design allows vendors to create a mixed up cluster of up to eight big and little cores. Cluster counts now extend up to eight cores, allowing developers to implement 4+4, 2+6, 1+7, 1+3, or any other configuration inside a single cluster.

The Cortex-A55 also adds support for Virtual Host Extensions (VHE), which AnandTech says will prove important for automotive and industrial safety and reliability. So whenever ARM releases new chip designs, it’s good news for smartphone lovers.

The Cortex-A75 offers more than 20 percent more peak and mobile performance than the Cortex-A73 at about the same energy efficiency. This boost is achieved while sustaining the same performance as the A73. This goes hand-in-hand with a more broad set of tweaks to the internal datapaths for the ALUs, though besides further optimizing how data moves between the FMA and ADD/SF units, ARM hasn’t said much more. With dedicated AI instructions and up to 2.5x the performance-per-milliwatt efficiency relative to today’s Cortex-A53 based devices, the Cortex-A55 is the world’s most versatile high-efficiency processor. Both the CPUs are specifically created to handle the challenges of the trending artificial language and machine language and boost the AI and ML performance by 10 to 15 times.

The British chipmaker said its Cortex-A75 and Cortex-A55 processors, together with the new Mali-G72 GPU are tailors made to suit the ever-changing requirements of the computing industry where the future computers are envisioned to have more human-like thinking abilities.

And the fact that they’ve unveiled their DynamIQ CPUs as well as the Mali-G72 GPU ahead of PC manufacturers, who will be showcasing their PC implementations of Intel’s processors at Computex in Taiwan, is a significant point to note. ARM has also improved performance density by up to 20 percent. Other memory subsystem features include support for asynchronous frequencies, and “potentially independent voltage and power rails for individual CPUs or groups of cores”, says ARM. However, there were limitations: only two sizes of core could be used, and they had to be in separate clusters.

The Cortex-A75 is a high performance core targeted at advanced use cases, including reliability, safety, machine learning and security, where ASIL D levels of performance are required.