ARM announces Cortex-A76 CPU, Mali-G76 GPU and Mali-V76 video processor for next generation of smartphones

Popular chip designer ARM has just announced a new generation of chips, the Cortex-A76, which the company claims will be 35 percent faster than its current crop of models. The new chips will start making its way into a smartphone in 2019. [caption id=“attachment_4492125” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representative Image.[/caption] The latest chips are its Cortex-A76 CPU, Mali-G76 GPU, and Mali-V76 video processor, meant for UHD displays. The Cortex-A76 replaces its current high-performance core, the Cortex-A75 launched last year while the Mali-G76 GPU takes over duties from the Mali-G72. The Mali-V76 is an addition to the lineup and is meant as a high-end option in place of the V52 and V61. As per a report by Android Authority, the new Cortex-A76 is a new high-performance microarchitecture design made from scratch by ARM to achieve performance points which were never really attempted before. ARM claims that this design maintains “laptop-class performance”, despite maintaining smartphone grade power consumption. The highlight here is that the A76 features a 200 percent performance gain compared to the current crop of laptop form factor products powered by the Cortex-A73. Machine learning applications will get a major boost as well with up to a claimed 400 percent boost thanks to optimized dot product instructions. The new 7 nm CPU running at 3 GHz also improves performance by close to 35 percent when compared to a 10nm A75 running at a clock speed of 2.8 GHz.

That’s not all, ARM is also boasting a 40 percent improvement in power efficiency, towards which the smaller target process node helps, but there are microarchitecture changes here as well which add to the efficiency. As per a blog post by the company, Cortex-A76 continues to be based on ARM’s DynamIQ cluster technology, which means that it will likely be paired up with the smaller, power-efficient Cortex-A55 inside heterogeneous CPU clusters. The Mali-G76 GPU is ARM’s offering to have the graphics departments handled for the next generation of SoCs. The architecture remains unchained here in comparison to the G72 and G52 but it offers a major 1.5 times performance boost with this generation at 7 nm. [caption id=“attachment_4492121” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Image: ARM[/caption] On top of the performance gains, the G76 also offers a 30 percent improvement in energy and area efficiency when built on the same process node. Moving down to 7nm will see further gains in terms of performance. The Mali-V76 is the company’s new vision processor designed for high-resolution displays. The new design offers up to 8k60 decode and 8k30 encode, as well as multiple 4K and 1080p streams for video calls. What this essentially means is that the chip is now twice as powerful as the Mali-V61. [caption id=“attachment_4492123” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Image: ARM[/caption] As mentioned by Android Authority in their report, this is overkill territory when it comes to smartphones but could be definitely used in future high-end TVs and higher resolution AR & VR headsets. Theoretically, everything sounds great, but we shall have to wait and see how it translates into real life performance.