ARM Announces New ARM Cortex-A72 Processor That Will Power Premium Mobile Devices In 2016

ARM yesterday announced the new Cortex-A72 processor that will enable premium experiences on 2016 mobile devices. This Cortex-A72 processor will deliver CPU performance that is 50X greater than the leading smartphones from just five years ago and it supports up to 4K120fps resolution. It will offer console-class gaming performance and graphics in addition to the support for Natural language user interfaces capable of running natively on a smartphone.

The new suite of IP includes the following,

• New ARMv8-A-based ARM® Cortex®-A72 processor, 50X increase in CPU performance compared to just five years ago
• New ARM CoreLink™ CCI-500 Cache Coherent Interconnect, allowing higher system bandwidth, and increasing system efficiency
• New ARM Mali™-T880 GPU delivers console-quality gaming and stunning visuals in a mobile power envelope

Read more about it from the press release below,

Introducing Cortex-A72, the Highest Performance ARM Cortex Processor

More than ten partners, including HiSilicon, MediaTek and Rockchip, have already licensed the Cortex-A72 processor, which is based on the ARMv8-A architecture that delivers energy-efficient 64-bit processing while providing full backward compatibility to existing 32-bit software. The Cortex-A72 processor will deliver substantial new benefits:

• Sustained operation within the constrained mobile power envelope at frequencies of 2.5 GHz in a 16nm FinFET process and scalable to higher frequencies for deployment in larger form factor devices
• 3.5X the performance of 2014 devices based on the Cortex-A15 processor
• Improved energy efficiency that delivers a 75 percent reduction in energy consumption when matching performance of 2014 devices
• Extended performance and efficiency when the Cortex-A72 CPU is combined with a Cortex-A53 CPU in ARM big.LITTLE™ processor configurations.

CoreLink CCI-500, Extending Efficiency Across the SoC

The CoreLink CCI-500 Cache Coherent Interconnect enables big.LITTLE processing and delivers system power savings thanks to an integrated snoop filter. CoreLink CCI-500 delivers double the peak memory system bandwidth and offers a 30 percent increase in processor memory performance compared to the previous generation CoreLink CCI-400. This enables more responsive user interfaces and accelerates memory intensive workloads such as productivity applications, video editing and multi-tasking. CoreLink CCI-500 fully supports ARM TrustZone® technology for a secure media path enabling protection of multimedia content when used with the Mali product family.

Mali-T880, A Ground-Breaking Mobile Graphics and Visual Experience

The new Mali-T880 GPU delivers 1.8X the graphics performance of today’s Mali-T760 based devices and a 40 percent reduction in energy consumption across identical workloads. The Mali-T880 enables high-end, complex use cases to be enjoyed on power-constrained mobile and consumer platforms with its advances in energy efficiency, additional arithmetic capabilities and scalability. For mobile gamers, the result is a more advanced gaming and console-like experience. Native support for 10-bit YUV provides stunning fidelity for premium 4K content, complementing the Mali-V550 video processor and Mali-DP550 display processors.

Energy-efficiency continues to be the guiding design principle across the spectrum of the Mali product family, including a diverse set of proven, system-wide bandwidth reduction technologies. In premium device configurations, the Mali-V550 video processor fully supports HEVC decode and encode on a single core. In addition, it offers scalability up to 4K120fps with its full eight cores. The Mali-DP550 display processor offers enhanced capabilities for offloading tasks such as composition, scaling, rotation and image post-processing from the GPU to maximize battery life.