Most of the news coming out of Computex 2019 is fairly nerdy, let’s be honest, and this announcement from ARM today squarely fits within that category. ARM is the chipset designer that’s behind most Android-based smartphones on the market, designing the CPU cores which make Android.. well.. Android.
In today’s industry keynote ahead of the official start of Computex, the UK chip designer has unveiled two new chip designs that promise giant strides in performance, especially for AI. The Mali-G77 GPU touts 40% faster graphics than the G76 which it replaces, and a whopping 60% jump in machine learning speed.
With that kind of speed increase – to give you some perspective – your phone could easily handle computer vision tasks, device optimisation and similar tasks far more gracefully than it could today. It might also extend your battery life – ARM claims a 30% improvement in battery efficiency.
The main news is the ARM Cortex A77 CPU – this is the technology that ARM licenses to chip manufacturers like Qualcomm, Huawei, Samsung and others to build their own ARM-based processors. The new hardware claims 20 percent faster instructions-per-clock performance without hurting efficiency, and that translates to roughly 35 times faster machine learning performance than the old A55.
When you’ll actually see the new Cortex A77 / Mali G77 combination in processors though, well that’s anyone’s guess. At this stage, it doesn’t look likely that Huawei will be able to incorporate the technology – given the US export bans which affect ARM’s IP – but Qualcomm, Samsung and others will likely start work on this straight away.
In all likelihood, we’re probably not going to see phones with these new internals until early 2020, at least.
