ARM Announces New Suite For Premium Mobile Devices

Multinational semiconductor and software designer company, ARM Holdings plc (ARM) has announced a premium mobile IP suite for enhancing the experience of the smartphone users. The suite consists of new Cortex-A72 processor, CoreLink CCI-500 interconnect, Mali-T880 GPU along with POP IP package for advanced 16 nm FinFET+. The mobile devices embedded with this new technology suite are expected to arrive in the market in 2016.


ARM Cortex-A72 Processor

Based on 64-bit ARMv8-A architecture that provides full backward compatibility to existing 32-bit software, Cortex-A72 processor is the kernel of the new suite. Due to its outstanding power-efficient pipeline and memory system, Cortex-A72 is one of the highest performing CPU technologies for developing mobile SoCs. It is built on Cortex-A57 processor that was designed in order to widen the capabilities of mobile and enterprise computing applications.


Coming to the performance, according to ARM, Cortex-A72’s CPU performance is 50 times more than the processors of the leading smartphones that were manufactured five years ago. Being optimized for 16 nm FinFET process technology, the new processor clocks up to 2.5 GHz. Cortex-A72 delivers three and a half times the performance provided by 28 nm Cortex-A15 processor introduced last year and is 75 percent more energy efficient as compared to the 2014 devices. It can be implemented individually. However, its performance and efficiency can be further improved by coupling it with Cortex-A53 processor and CoreLink CCI Interconnect in an ARM big.LITTLE configuration. The processor is also compatible with Mali-DP550 display processor and Mali-V550 video processor.

ARM CoreLink CCI-500 Interconnect

CoreLink CCI-500 cache coherent interconnect delivers twice the peak memory system bandwidth and increases memory performance of the processor by 30 percent as compared to CoreLink CCI-400. The user interfaces become more responsive and the intensive workloads related to memory such as productivity applications, video editing and multi-tasking are accelerated due to this increase in performance. CoreLink CCI-500 also offers system power savings with integrated snoop filter.


The new interconnect not only enables big.LITTLE processing but also provides IO coherency for other agents such as Mali GPU, network interfaces or accelerators. With ARM TrustZone technology, it provides protection to multimedia content when used with Mali products.

ARM Mali-T880 GPU

The new GPU is 1.8 times more efficient as compared to Mali-T760 in terms of graphics performance and is more energy-efficient as it consumes 40 % less energy while performing across similar workloads. Mali-T880 drives the complex graphics use-cases like advanced gaming to high-end devices such as smartphones. The GPU cores can be scaled from one to sixteen and it supports 10-bit YUV format for 4K content, complementing Mali family products such as V550 video processor and DP550 display processors.


POP IP Package For 16nm FinFET+

The new core-hardening acceleration technology, POP IP for TSMC's 16FF+ (16nm FinFET Plus) technology that features FinFET transistors will allow silicon vendors to migrate from 32/28nm process nodes and will improve time-to-market. ARM POP IP will allow the new Cortex-A72 processor to perform up to 3 GHz for the devices having large form-factor under typical conditions. Moreover, it supports the implementations of the Mali-T880 GPU for 16FF+.

The premium mobile experience suite will be used for capturing 4K videos up to 120 fps, console-class gaming, fluid handling of productivity suites and office applications, and natural language processing for smartphones.

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