The Cortex-A73 and Mali-G71 graphics processors have been enhanced to support improved levels of performance and efficiency gains that are intended to support new products with enhanced contextual and visual capabilities that support AR and VR, the company explained, allowing devices to run high resolution content for much longer periods while staying within strict mobile power budgets.
According to Peter Hutton, ARM EVP and President of Product Groups, these processors will be in SoCs this year and in handsets in 2017.
At under 0.65mm2 per core (on a 10nm FinFET process technology) the Cortex-A73 is the smallest and most efficient ‘big’ ARMv8-A core to date. Its advanced mobile microarchitecture enables a 30 percent uplift in sustained performance and power efficiency over the Cortex-A72.
The new Mali processor, the Mali-G71, has a new micro-architecture called Bifrost that has been optimised for Vulkan and other industry-standard APIs and builds on innovations from the previous Utgard and Midgard architectures.
The Mali-G71 GPU enables a 50 percent increase in graphics performance, a 20 percent increase in power-efficiency and 40 percent more performance per mm2.
The Mali-G71 also scales efficiently up to 32 shader cores, twice as many as the previous generation premium IP GPU – the Mali-T880.
Ten partners have licensed the Cortex-A73 so far, including HiSilicon, Marvell and Mediatek.
