Arm Introduces New Armv9 Chips: Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710, and Cortex-A510

The Arm announced on Tuesday (25/05) its first line of CPU designs produced with the Armv9 architecture: the flagship Cortex-X2 processor (direct heir to the Cortex-X1 launched last year) and the mid-range Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510. Introduced this year, the Armv9 microarchitecture delivers advances in performance, with new security and artificial intelligence (AI) features.

While most people aren’t familiar with Arm’s designs, the British company’s chips power nearly every Android smartphone processor — from Samsung and Huawei to Google and OnePlus. These brands license cores made by the company and pair them with GPUs, NPUs, and other types of devices to form a processor — or a SoC (system-on-a-chip), to be exact.

O Snapdragon 888, for example, has a Cortex-X1, three Cortex-A78 cores and four Cortex-A55 cores. Therefore, the designs presented here are, to some extent, a preview of how Android smartphones will be structured from next year.

And it's safe to say that the advances will be quite significant. Just to give you an idea, according to Arm, a set of CPUs with Armv9 microarchitecture (for example, a single Cortex-X2 associated with three A710 and four A510) will provide a 30% superiority in peak performance and energy efficiency compared to an Armv8 cluster. So, let's go to the list.

Cortex-X2

The successor to the Cortex-X1, the Cortex-X2 promises to deliver a 16% performance boost over its predecessor and twice the machine learning performance. Arm's designers have improved the chip's prediction engine and, as a result, reduced the number of errors in data transmission, boosting performance. The chip's L3 cache has also been doubled in size from 8 to 16 megabytes.

According to Arm, processors with Cortex-X2 will have a 30% improvement in performance compared to smartphones equipped with SoCs that use the X1. The British company has directed the production of this CPU to “premium smartphones and laptops”.

Cortex-A710

Compared to its predecessor, the A78, the Cortex-A710 CPU presents a 10% improvement in peak performance. The main improvement, however, concerns the core's artificial intelligence, which is twice as good as the previous generation, and the 30% gain in energy efficiency. Arm has also improved the prediction engine on the processor's front-end, doubling its main structures, the Branch Target Buffer (BTB) and the Global History Buffer (GHB).

Unlike the Cortex-X2, which works exclusively on 64-bit applications, the Cortex-A710 will still support 32-bit applications. It’s worth noting that starting in 2023, all Arm CPU designs for mobile devices will be produced with 64-bit instructions only.

Cortex-A510

After four years of waiting, Arm has finally released a new CPU for more basic performance. The Cortex-A510 is the successor to the Cortex-A55, a CPU that can be found in a smorgasbord of mid-range and entry-level smartphone processors — for example, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 and Exynos 850, from Samsung, which powers the A21s.

According to Arm, the Cortex-A510 offers 35% gains in peak performance and 20% in energy efficiency, in addition to three times better machine learning compared to the A55. The new chip also offers the possibility of a merged-core microarchitecture. Two Cortex-A510 cores can be combined into a complex and share resources, such as the L2 cache and the SIMD engine. This gain in efficiency in the chip area, according to the British company, ends up offering “a wide range of configurations for scalability in different consumer devices”.

Learn more about Arm's new (and first) Armv9 processors on the British company's website.

Arm also introduced new GPUs, check here.

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