5 Things You Must Know About Next-Generation Smartphone Processors
It is the time of the year when Arm, the mastermind behind your smartphone’s chip, unveils the fundamental component of cutting-edge System-on-Chips (SoCs) from Qualcomm, MediaTek, and more. If you have been pondering over what the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 or Dimensity 9300 will embody, you have come to the correct place.
During Arm Tech Day 2023, Arm revealed an assortment of novel CPU cores encompassing high-performance and low-power utilization scenarios, accompanied by its fifth-generation Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), replete with ray tracing graphics support. Therefore, let us explicate the indispensable facts you need to acquaint yourself with regarding all this state-of-the-art technology.
Farewell to 32-bit (in a resolute manner)
Before we delve into the novel hardware, a significant software implication awaits our attention. The latest Arm processors exclusively support 64-bit architecture, including the diminutive cores. Rest assured, there will not be a revision to 32-bit for any of these cores in order to retain compatibility with legacy systems for an extended period.
As these latest Arm cores are all founded upon the state-of-the-art ARMv9.2 architecture, any chip employing them cannot incorporate older architectures or 32-bit capable cores. Consequently, all future high-end smartphone chipsets and Arm SoCs in other domains, such as laptops, will exclusively adhere to the 64-bit paradigm.
After years of incremental progress, we are finally embarking upon the era of 64-bit exclusivity.
As momentous as this may sound, the groundwork has been meticulously laid for quite some time now, and Arm now exudes confidence that the transition has been seamlessly executed. Arm has progressively phased out 32-bit compatibility over the course of several years, making the shift to 64-bit with the Cortex-X2 in 2021, followed by the Cortex-A715 mid-core in 2022. Similarly, Google has been encouraging developers to update their apps to 64-bit since 2019 and has been serving only 64-bit apps to compatible devices as of August 2021.
Finally, after numerous years of anticipation, the era of 32-bit Android has reached its conclusive end.
An unrestrained colossal core
The actual hardware announcements commence with the introduction of three new CPU cores: the dominant Cortex-X4, the intermediate Cortex-A720, and the energy-efficient Cortex-A520. These cores succeed the Cortex-X3, A-715, and A510 cores from 2022, which powered several flagship chipsets, including the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
This year’s headline enhancements encompass an average performance boost of 14% for the 3.4GHz Cortex-X4 when compared to the typical 3.25GHz X3 found in the 8 Gen 2, specifically in single-threaded workloads on identical manufacturing nodes. Equally remarkable is the 40% reduction in power consumption for the same level of performance as the Cortex-X3. These figures do not account for the forthcoming transition to the next-generation 3nm manufacturing processes, which will further amplify the performance. Nevertheless, pushing the performance boundaries beyond the X3 eventually leads to an increase in power consumption compared to the previous generation.
Nevertheless, this is indeed delightful news for those who are concerned about thermal performance and battery life when running these powerful cores at full capacity. This significant improvement also opens the door to the inclusion of two or more potent Cortex-X4 cores in a CPU cluster without a substantial impact on battery life and heat dissipation. Stay alert for this remarkable development.
The key to Arm’s attainment of these gains lies in a wider instruction width and a redesigned instruction fetch, enabling the core to accomplish even more per clock cycle. And all of this has been achieved with just a 10% increase in area compared to last year. Truly impressive. For a more detailed understanding of these subtle changes, you can refer to our in-depth exploration of the Cortex-X4.
Compact cores to extend your phone’s endurance
The CPU core of this year attains 20% higher power efficiency than the Cortex-A715 core from the previous year, on a like-for-like manufacturing basis, while targeting the same performance level. Alternatively, the chip can provide 4% more performance while consuming the same amount of power. The key to this triumph lies in shorter and more efficient pipelines, incorporating a modified version of the Cortex-X series’ spatial-prefetch engine, which optimally fetches instructions into the core.
Arm has also expanded the range of Cortex-A720 implementations this year, not just in terms of cache size, but also by shrinking certain components while retaining their functionality, thus conserving silicon area. In its most compact configuration, the Cortex-A720 can be scaled down to the same size as the Cortex-A78 core from 2020, while delivering a 10% performance boost and encompassing all of ARMv9’s security features and other advantages. Although we do not anticipate this configuration to be implemented in smartphones due to the associated performance penalty, it will undoubtedly be a boon for industries where the size of the silicon area is the limiting factor.
More efficient CPU cores are poised to revolutionize battery life.
Completing Arm’s CPU announcements is the introduction of a novel energy-efficient CPU core, the Cortex-A520. Once again, with a 22% increase in efficiency compared to last year’s A510 design and the potential for further gains with smaller manufacturing nodes, your smartphone’s battery life should witness a significant improvement next year.
Interestingly, Arm has removed one of the arithmetic logic units (ALU) this year, from which most of the core’s power savings originate. The engineers have regained additional performance through new data prefetch and cache enhancements, enabling the chip to offer 8% more average performance than last year’s model while maintaining the same power consumption. In contrast to last year’s 32-bit revision, the A520 represents a 64-bit-only little CPU.
Could peculiar and marvelous core designs be on the horizon?
It has been more than a decade since Arm introduced the big. LITTLE CPU cluster architecture, which later evolved into the more versatile DynamIQ fabric in 2017, accommodates modern triple-core designs. Over this period, CPU capabilities have evolved, with peak performance skyrocketing alongside substantial improvements in energy efficiency. Consequently, the earlier 4+4 CPU core configurations have given way to 1+4+3, 2+2+4, and other cluster variations. The enhanced energy efficiency and sustainable performance of today’s middle cores, such as the Cortex-A720, might indicate that this paradigm is poised for another transformation.
For instance, Arm presented an intriguing theoretical example of a 1+5+2 configuration during its presentation. Incorporating five middle CPU cores would provide additional sustainable threads, thereby enhancing gaming performance, which benefits from multi-threaded capabilities but does not necessitate the raw single-core power of the X series cores.
Greater diversity in CPU cluster configurations might empower phones to achieve higher performance without sacrificing battery life.
Similarly, the cumulative performance advancements of Arm’s smallest cores, such as the new Cortex-A520, imply that you do not necessarily require four cores to handle background tasks like checking messages. Three or even two cores might suffice. On a related note, the latest iteration of DynamIQ now supports up to 14 cores per cluster, but this extensive configuration is intended for laptop use cases rather than smartphones.
Of course, the layout of CPU clusters is entirely at the discretion of Arm’s silicon partners, including Qualcomm, Samsung, and others, who may have identified similar trends. Leaks about the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 certainly suggest that they might have. Regardless, it is intriguing to note that Arm is contemplating the merits of these designs internally. The landscape of CPU performance and efficiency has changed, and we may witness corresponding developments in CPU cluster designs, if not this year, then in the near future.
Next-generation Immortalis graphics
An Arm launch would not be complete without the introduction of new graphics components. Arm has unveiled three new entries spanning the mid to premium tiers of the market. All three are based on Arm’s 5th Gen GPU architecture, boasting a remarkable 14% performance improvement and a 40% reduction in memory bandwidth compared to the previous generation. Moreover, they occupy only 2% more area per core than last year’s models.
The flagship product is the Arm Immortalis G720, featuring a core count ranging from ten to sixteen, along with mandatory ray-tracing capabilities. The regular Mali-G720 can be configured with six to nine cores. While it can also support ray tracing, Arm does not recommend it due to the limited core count, which may not deliver an optimal ray-tracing experience. It is worth noting that Arm incorporates a ray tracing unit within each shader core, meaning that performance scales with the core count. Lastly, the Mali-G620 provides a more affordable option, available with five cores or fewer. This configuration, however, occupies the same area as the Mali-G510 while offering superior performance and features.
Ray tracing has become an integral part of Arm’s mobile graphics roadmap.
For a comprehensive understanding of Arm’s 5th Gen architecture, you can refer to our detailed analysis. However, the noteworthy change lies in the refinement of the core’s deferred rendering pipeline. Arm now defers both Vertex and Fragment shading in most instances, thereby minimizing excessive re-shading and reducing memory calls. As a result, we observe the performance boost and significantly lower memory bandwidth metrics, the latter of which is particularly crucial for power efficiency. With these advancements in mind, it is conceivable that future SoCs will feature larger GPU core counts, enabling higher performance without compromising battery life.
In recent years, we have grown accustomed to Arm’s double-digit performance gains. Nevertheless, it remains undeniably impressive that next-generation smartphones and Arm-based PCs will continue to witness substantial performance improvements compared to devices released within the past twelve months. We expect smartphones powered by Arm’s latest CPU and GPU core designs to be available towards the end of 2023.
Read More:Arm Unveils Revolutionary Smartphone Technology, MediaTek Partnership Announced
