ARM today explained its new high-end CPU core design which will be used in the making of future chipsets in future flagship devices. The evolutionary update is the Cortex-A78 and the Cortex-X1 which both promises to be a major enhance experience when finally deployed in chipsets.
The Cortex-A78 will be the successor to the current Cortex-A77 which is a really fast core in the ARM’s line and when compared on the same TDP, the Cortex-A78 will be able to offer about 20% increase in performance while consuming the same amount of power or 50% less consumption for the same CPU performance. The image below explains more on this.
The newer Cortex-A78 will be more smaller compared to its predecessor and it will use 15% less space in an octa-core chipset in a 4x Cortex-A78 + Cortex-A55 configuration while ARM hasn’t yet announced the new high-efficiency core to replace the Cortex-A55.
And then the Cortex-X1, this is a new custom line of CPU core which is meant to gear up performances altogether. The core design is as a result of the ARM’s CXC program where ARM collaborates with partners in order to create custom cores. The Cortex-X1 has about 30% higher peak performance than the Cortex-A77 and is 23% faster than the new Cortex-A78 at integer calculations.
With that kind of performance boost, the X1 is both bigger and much power-demanding than the A78 core and because of that, it’s unlikely we’ll see multiple Cortex-X1 cores in a smartphone CPU. The most likely combination will be a single Cortex-X1 which will be combined with three Cortex-A78 cores and then some A5x core for less demanding tasks.
And speaking of the GPU, ARM unveiled the Mali-G78 and G68 while the former is still based on the Valhall architecture of the Mali-G77 but is up to 25% faster in some cases as well as offer support of up to 24 core designs so Game performances will have about 17% real-world performance increase.
Then the Mali-G68 got most of its features from the Mali-G78 but offer support for fewer core designs and is both smaller and more efficient.
