ARM has announced a new CPU and GPU for flagship mobile devices, which will be available in 2017. The Cortex-A73 CPU and Mali-G71 GPU are designed to support VR and AR applications.
The new core in the Mali-G71 enables a 50% increase in graphical performance, a 20% increase in power efficiency and 40% more performance per mm², says ARM. The GPU is able to scale efficiently up to 32 shader cores: twice as many as the Mali-T880. It is also fully coherent. Mediatek, Hisilicon and Samsung have already licensed the core.
ARM’s Cortex-A73, at under 6.55mm² per core on a 10nm FinFET process, is the smallest and most efficient ‘big’ (for big.LITTLE configurations) ARMv8-A core. ARM says that it is has achieved a 30% increase in sustained performance and power efficiency over the Cortex-A72. Speeds of up to 2.8GHz have been achieved. 10 partners have licensed the A73 so far, including Marvell, Hisilicon and Mediatek.
