Arm has announced new CPU, a GPU and a VPU design for video processing. The Cortex A-76 is claimed to be 35% faster and 40% more power efficient than last year’s designs and the company claims that the performance gets within 10% of the performance of Intel CPUs, although chips should be 4X smaller. It is claimed to boost AI performance by 4X. The new design can be used for Windows 10 PCs.
In graphics, the new Mali G76 represents the latest implementation of Arm’s Bifrost GPU architecture. It is claimed to deliver (using a 7nm process chip) an estimated 50% overall improvement compared to the existing G72 made in a 10-nm process.
The G76 can be configured with up to 20 shader cores and an L2 cache configurable from 512 Kbytes to 4 Mbytes. Each shader has three execution engines.
In video processing, the Mali-V76 improves 4K performance and, running at 800 MHz, can decode a single 8K video stream at 60 frames/second. The next-generation design will support 8K60 encode.
The 8K support is initially geared for VR headsets displaying 4K video to each eye (so 7680 x 2160 overall). Full 8K content is not expected to be generally available until 2020.
The designs are expected to be put into chips in smartphones before the end of the year.
