Less than a year has passed since the announcement of the ARM Immortalis GPU, the smartphone graphics with hardware ray-tracing support that was supposed to revolutionize mobile gaming. While that revolution is far from happening, ARM hopes to usher in another with its own new cores for smartphone CPUs announced at Computex.
As an ARM press release explains, the company has in fact announced its own first designs for 64-bit CPU only for smartphones: in doing so, the company put a heavy sword of Damocles on all Android phone (and software) manufacturers, imposing, within a few years, a forced transition from a mixed 32/64-bit system to one only 64-bit.
The new ARM cores are the Cortex-X4, the Cortex-A720 and the Cortex-A520which should be the basis of the new Snapdragon 8 Gen3, Qualcomm’s top-of-the-range SoC for next year, which will therefore be found on the bulk of high-end smartphones arriving between late 2023 and early 2024. This, of course, means that the whole proposal high-end of the Android market in the coming months will finally be 64-bit.
Il Cortex-X4 is a Performance Core designed for high-end smartphones. The new architecture marks a clear improvement compared to the current generation Cortex-X3, with 15% higher performance and consumption that drops by as much as 40%. The new Core should allow for even faster transitions between one app and another and extremely fluid system interfaces.
Il Cortex-A720 represents the “middle core” of ARM for the new generation: it supplants the Cortex-A715 and is traditionally the core that performs most of the functions of computing on smartphones. This year, ARM has placed a huge emphasis on efficiency, cutting fuel consumption by 20% over its 2022 design.
Finally, the Cortex-A520 is the new Efficiency Core of the company, designed primarily for process management in background and for all those actions that require little computing power. Again, the focus is on efficiency: consumption drops by 22%, while performance rises by 8%.