If you obsess over the specs of your next gaming rig but can't immediately rattle off how many processor cores your smartphone has, don't worry, you're not alone. Even though smartphones can handle many of the tasks you'd need a PC for just a few generations ago, you're likely more worried about whether or not you can last through the day on a single charge than how quickly your apps load.
But ARM, which makes the chipsets found in high-end and budget handsets, is worried about smartphone performance. The company's engineers are preparing for a future in which phones are packed with processor-intensive artificial intelligence but still must respect the battery and thermal limitations. Engineers hope that the new Cortex-A75 and Cortex-A55 processors will be up to the task.
Unveiled this week, the Cortex-A75 delivers a 50 percent performance boost over current ARM chipsets, according to the company, which will make it powerful enough to be used not only in phones, but also in a wide range of hardware from servers to laptops. Its sibling, the Cortex-A55, offers a more modest performance boost but is more than twice as efficient as current chipsets.
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ARM also announced a new mobile GPU, the Mali-G72, which is designed for use in Internet of Things devices that process massive amounts of machine learning data locally instead of sending them to the cloud, as well as for products with demanding graphics needs like standalone VR headsets.
The new chipsets, which will start showing up in devices early next year, are among the first offerings from ARM's Dynamiq architecture, which the company announced in March. Dynamiq-based devices will eventually be able to offer 50 times greater performance than ARM's existing architecture, which powers the current Cortex-A series of processors.
Currently, ARM is in an enviable position: it claims that its technologies are used by an estimated 70 percent of the world's population. But competitors like Intel and Qualcomm are also designing their own powerful chips for an AI future (some of which incorporate ARM's technology), so if ARM gets AI wrong, it has a lot to lose.
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