Last year ARM introduced ARMv9, its first chip architecture in a decade. With it came the first chips that took advantage of it, and now the company has announced the second generation of these chips: the ARM Cortex-X3, ARM Cortex-A715 and ARM Cortex-A510, but wait, because there is more.
The big surprise may indeed not be in those upgraded CPUs, but in the new ‘Immortalis’ GPUs, which succeed the Mali and will have ray tracing support for the first time. That raises mobiles even more prepared for gamers.
ARM wants to say goodbye to 32 bits, but not quite
The most powerful of all these processors is the Cortex-X3, which is geared towards higher performance: according to ARM it is capable of achieving up to 22% compared to Cortex-X2. In the company they even made a nod to its potential role in laptops: it would be, said those responsible, 34% more powerful than “consumer” laptops with an Intel Core i7 1260P of 28 W.
The efficiency also seems have won wholebut in ARM they did not seem especially focused on that section: with the same consumption the Cortex-X3 are more powerful than the X2, but no specific profit figures were given with respect to the previous generation for these CPUs.
In second place are the Cortex-A715, which are also an evolution of the Cortex-A710 from last year and which stand out for something also important: they are chips that (like the Cortex-X2 and the Cortex-X3) only support 64 bit binarieswhile the previous ones still continued to support 32-bit ones.
The performance gain is modest at 5%, but it’s not bad news considering that these cores they are as powerful as the Cortex-X1 that were launched in 2020 and that, for example, are the basis of the current Google Tensor.
Where there are significant improvements in efficiency compared to its predecessors: they are 20% more efficient chips than the Cortex-A710which will undoubtedly help to extend the autonomy of the battery.
The last protagonists in this new family of CPUs are the efficient cores (little) Cortex-A510 that gain 5% in efficiency and that curiously optionally bring back 32-bit binary supportsomething curious when the previous version of these chips – also called Cortex-A510 – only offered support for 64 bits.
Bet on ray tracing
The other big announcement from ARM was the arrival of the GPU Immortalis-G715which stand out especially for being the first graphics cores of the company with ray tracing support or ray tracing.
This support will allow more photorealistic visual experiences—games, in particular— in which the way in which it simulates how light affects a scene —in reflections, shadows, etc— is much more precise and faithful to reality.
On the Immortalis G-715 GPU it is achieved a 300% improvement in ray tracing Regarding the Mali GPUs that barely paid attention to that section, and that the Shader Cores area used for this purpose represents less than 4% of the total chip.
The chips are also 15% more powerful and 15% more efficient than the cores of the previous Mali-G715, although it is also true that this “rebranding” of the Mali GPUs has between 10 and 16 Shader cores, when the Mali-G715 had between 7 and 9.
There is a second GPU, the Mali-G615, which is more modest (between 1 and 6 Shader Cores). It doesn’t offer support for ray tracing, but it does support Variable Rate Shading, another important option for mobile gaming.
We will see how the Snapdragon, Dimensity and Exynos of 2023 take advantage of them
From now on Remains to be seen how these new CPU and GPU cores are used in future designs from Qualcomm, Mediatek or Samsung, for example.
It is to be hoped that the Snapdragon, the Dimensity and the Exynos of 2023 make use of a combination of those Cortex-X3, Cortex-A715 and Cortex-A510 in their future SoCs, and also take advantage of the new features of the Immortalis-G715 GPUs.
It will also be interesting to see how these cores impact the theoretical farewell (gradual, yes) of 32-bit mobile applications. It seems clear that ARM wants here to say goodbye to these options and force -with some margin- developers make the definitive leap to 64-bit architectures and binaries.
