Every year, Arm’s CPU core announcements set the stage for the next generation of smartphone and computing performance. And with the newly unveiled 2024 lineup, the chipmaker is pulling out all the stops to usher in a brave new world of power and efficiency.
Let’s kick things off with Arm’s new flagship CPU beating at the heart of this release – the Cortex-X925. Dropping the “Cortex-X” naming convention, this beastly “super-core” promises staggering performance gains with up to 36% better instructions-per-clock (IPC) than last year’s already impressive X4 core.
There’s more under the X925’s hood too, core boasts a massive 3MB dedicated L2 cache that allows it to flex a whopping 46% AI performance uplift compared to the previous gen.
Of course, with great performance comes…well, greater power demands. Arm admits the X925 is an absolute battery hog operating at its full potential. Thanks to intelligent efficiency optimizations, the core can still sip power responsibly when it needs to.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Arm’s new mid-range Cortex-A725 core living up to its efficiency moniker. While the IPC gains over last year’s A720 are relatively modest at around 10%, the true star of the show is the A725’s aggressive power optimization.
Thanks to smart features like dedicated 1MB L2 cache, 16MB L3 support, and Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), A725 manages to slash its peak power demands by over 30% versus the A720 while still improving performance. That’s the kind of efficiency play we love to see.
Arm Ecosystem Expands Further Into PCs
Perhaps most interestingly, Arm is pushing its new cores into fresh frontiers with optimized PC configurations promising jaw-dropping performance numbers. A quad X925 paired with quad A725 cluster could theoretically double the grunt of current flagship smartphone setups.
But crank things up to a 12-core X925 configuration? Arm claims that monster setup could offer up to 4 times the performance of today’s smartphones while outpacing even the latest commercially available laptops in single-threaded tasks by 25%. Desktop-grade performance from a mobile chip is no longer just a pipe dream.
Rounding out the announcements is the new Cortex-A520 built with Arm’s latest 3nm reference designs. While the core itself is architecturally unchanged from previous gens, the move to 3nm process translates to around 15% better power efficiency out of the box.
Between the brawniness of the X925, the smart efficiencies of the A725, ARM aggressive expansion into PC chips, 2024 CPU core lineup has the potential to be an absolute game-changer for mobile – and overall computing – performance in the years ahead.
