For Small Screens to Large: Introducing a New Suite of IP for Premium Mobile Experiences

Over the last five years, we’ve seen CPU performance on smartphones increase an average of 20+ percent every year without compromising battery life. However, the same cannot be said for laptops, which have struggled to adapt to a slowing Moore’s Law over the last few years, delivering annual performance gains averaging only single-digit percentages while failing to enable any significant increases in battery life.

•  Arm Cortex-A76 CPU: New microarchitecture enabling 35 percent more performance year-over-year for increased productivity
•  Arm Mali-G76 GPU: Untethered gaming and on-device machine learning (ML) with 30 percent higher efficiency and performance over previous generations
•  Arm Mali-V76 VPU: Enabling UHD 8K viewing experiences across more devices

Over the last five years, we’ve seen CPU performance on smartphones increase an average of 20+ percent every year without compromising battery life. However, the same cannot be said for laptops, which have struggled to adapt to a slowing Moore’s Law over the last few years, delivering annual performance gains averaging only single-digit percentages while failing to enable any significant increases in battery life.

This cadence of significant smartphone performance efficiency increases enabled by Arm did not go unnoticed by the Windows laptop ecosystem which now have integrated Arm-based SoCs from Qualcomm into their initial Always-Connected PC offerings. These Arm-based laptops are already paying off with an unprecedented 20-plus hours of battery life and steadily improving performance thanks to ongoing OS and application optimizations.

Yet, the first-generation of Arm-based laptops are just the first step in the aforementioned annual performance cadence for those devices. Today Arm is announcing a new premium client solution suite of Arm computing and multimedia IP that not only provides more opportunities for smartphone innovation, but makes any gap in laptop performance a non-issue with a CPU design that delivers a staggering increase in year-over-year performance.

Our new client IP platform solution for 2019 has generated a level of excitement within our ecosystem which I have never seen during my 5+ years at Arm thanks to the possibilities it offers for increased productivity, immersive AR/VR and gaming, AI/ML, and UHD 8K viewing experiences on more devices. Not to mention, this suite of premium IP perfectly complements our Project Trillium platform, further optimizing machine learning and AI uses at the edge. The elements of the platform are:

Cortex-A76: Powering the journey for laptop-class performance

The new Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, based on DynamIQ technology, delivers laptop-class performance while maintaining the power efficiency of a smartphone. We’ve already seen the success of the recently launched Arm-based Windows10 PCs, delivering unimaginable 20-plus hours of battery life, a true LTE connected PC, and a trusted Windows app ecosystem. Building on that momentum, the new Cortex-A76 CPU brings choice and flexibility to consumers from a trusted architecture, delivering the 35 percent y-o-y performance gain along with 40 percent improved efficiency.

As the only compute architecture delivering these generation-over-generation gains, it’s exciting to watch Arm continue to push performance while still becoming increasingly efficient.

The new Cortex-A76 also delivers 4x compute performance improvements for AI/ML at the edge, enabling responsive, secure experiences on PCs and smartphones. This level of performance, power efficiency, and flexibility changes how consumers engage with their new PCs giving them more power to accomplish what they want to, whenever and wherever they want to accomplish it.

Mali-G76: High-performance gaming, cross-platform experiences

The gaming market is expected to reach $137.9 billion in 2018, making it one of the largest revenue markets globally and a key driver in increasing consumer performance demands as they look to satisfy their thirst for high-end gaming on-the-go. The Mali-G76 gives developers and consumers what they want by delivering 30 percent more efficiency and performance density. These generational enhancements provide developers with more performance headroom to bring more high-end gaming titles to mobile app ecosystems and enable them to write new apps that integrate augmented and virtual reality into our everyday lives.

Mali-V76: Enabling the ultimate UHD immersive experience

As the world moves towards UHD 8K content, we’re ensuring our IP will support encoding and decoding for content on smartphones and other devices. The Mali-V76 supports 8K decode up to 60fps or four 4K streams at 60fps giving consumers the opportunity to stream four movies, record video while video conferencing, or watch four games in 4K. And at lower resolutions, and still at full HD, Mali-G76 will support up to 16 streams of content, creating a 4×4 video wall, a very popular use case in the Chinese market.

This is only the beginning

Mobility is freedom – freedom from wires, freedom to be flexible in working, freedom from not having to recharge your mobile device after a day’s worth of use, freedom to choose how you want to connect to make sure you are ready for the 5G revolution.

Arm and its strong partner ecosystem are redefining mobile and changing where and how innovation happens across the mobile spectrum, from small to large-screen devices. Together, we transform how we live, work, play, and learn from mobile phones, tablets to PCs across different operating systems–all seamlessly and all connected through 5G. I am excited about this journey and the new suite of IP that will unleash a new wave of unimagined experiences.