ARM Unveils New Cortex-A55, A75 CPU Designs with DynamIQ and Mali-G72 GPU

BY Rajesh Pandey

Published 29 May 2017

ARM, the company’s which designs chips that power the majority of Android devices out there, today unveiled its latest flagship mobile processor design: Cortex-A75. The company says that its new flagship chip design boasts of a 22 percent improvement in performance over its predecessor, the Cortex-A73.

In addition, ARM also unveiled its new mid-range Cortex-A55 chip design which has the highest power efficiency of any chip ever unveiled by the company.

The two new chip designs will be available under the company’s DynamIQ CPUs brand which means that OEMs are free to pair any number of cores in any order they wish to. This means, that while we have so far seen octa-core and hexa-core big.LITTLE implementations, we can now see 1x Cortex-A75 CPU being paired with 7x Cortex-A55 cores DynamIQ configurations ensuring the best in terms of power efficiency and single-threaded performance.

Cortex-A55

With Cortex-A55, ARM has focused on improving performance by integrating an L2 cache that reduces latency by 50 percent and a new data prefetcher that leads to a substantial performance improvement while still being up to 15 percent more power efficient than Cortex-A53 despite the slightly higher power consumption.

Then, there’s the Cortex-A75 which ARM claims offers 22 percent better performance than the A73. The chip design now also supports a bigger power envelope as ARM wants to push this chip for use in bigger mobile devices, Chromebooks, and 2-in-1s.

Over and above the pure performance improvements, the new chip designs from ARM also come with specific processing components for machine learning and onboard AI computation. With AI and machine learning going to be the next big deal in the coming years, any computation improvement in this area will lead to significant improvements.

In addition to two new CPU designs, ARM also unveiled its new Mali GPU: the Mali-G72. Successor to the G71, the new GPU comes with 32 shader cores and offers 20 percent better performance density and 25 percent higher energy efficiency. In its slides, ARM claims that the G72 is 17 percent better than the G71 in machine learning benchmarks.

ARM released the design of its CPU and GPU to vendors at the end of 2016, and now it is up to OEMs to implement them in their devices and release them to consumers. Ideally, we should see smartphone makers launch devices powered by ARM’s latest chips in early 2018, though some Chinese OEMs will beat them by releasing products with Cortex-A75 and A55 cores later this year.

If you are interested in reading more about ARM’s latest CPU and GPU designs, make sure to head over to AnandTech.