ARM ha reso ufficiali i nuovi progetti per i SoC di domani. Servirà tempo per le prime applicazioni, ma i dati sono già parecchio interessanti.
Giuseppe Croce Giornalista
Peppe Croce, giornalista dal 2008, si occupa di device elettronici e nuove tecnologie applicate al mondo automotive. È entrato in Libero Tecnologia nel 2018.
Tre nuove architetture per tre CPU, la “mente” dei dispositivi a cui sono affidati i calcoli, e altrettante GPU, il cuore dell’elaborazione grafica. È il futuro reso attuale nelle scorse ore dal team ARM, che adesso distribuirà ai partner le nuove architetture in base alle quali i progettisti potranno sviluppare i SoC di domani, anzi del 2022 e del 2023.
Sgombriamo subito il campo da possibili equivoci. ARM doesn’t produce chips, ARM is a company that makes architectures, patents them and grants them to individual manufacturers such as Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung through Exynos, previously Huawei through HiSilicon (which now can no longer talk to ARM because of the US blacklist), but also Apple that designs in house the chips of iPhone, iPad and recently also Mac, and Google that will use a proprietary solution – on ARM architecture – for Google Pixel 6. In short: any company that wants to design its own SoC, today passes by ARM architectures to be then modeled on their needs and on what the designers want to achieve. Today’s SoCs all look similar because they start from the same design.
Arm’s new CPUs
Arm’s new designs benefit from an all-new architecture: the previous ArmV8.2, the one on which existing top-of-the-line SoCs are based, will be replaced by ArmV9. The transition will be worth more performance (also in terms of security) combined with high energy efficiency.
ARM has updated both the “big” cores, those dedicated to the highest workloads, as well as the “LITTLE” cores, which alongside the first perform less onerous tasks with much lower power consumption.
The Cortex-X2 core belongs by far to the first category, that of big cores. The second generation of the high-powered Cortex-X2 custom cores raises performance by 16% compared to the previous generation and doubles the number of machine learning operations, one of the fronts on which manufacturers have pushed hardest in recent years and which is therefore destined for ever-increasing workloads.
The Cortex-A710 core retires the current Cortex-A78, compared to which it increases performance by 10% while consuming 30% less power. Again, machine learning operations increase twice as much as before.
The Cortex-A510 core replaces the current Cortex-A55 after four years of honorable service. The improvements of the new LITTLE core, here, are more than remarkable: performance up by 35% against a +20% in energy efficiency, while the machine learning operations are up by three times.
The new ARM GPU
And if an SoC is composed of CPU and GPU (but not only), ARM has spent to improve the design of the second one, the famous Mali GPU. There are three of them: Mali-G310, Mali-G510 and Mali-G710, in ascending order of performance.
The promise of ARM is a +35% in machine learning and a +20% each in gaming and power saving. ARM’s numbers refer to the most powerful GPU of the lot compared to the current generation (Mali-G710), but the advancements are similar to those of the two new GPUs.
When ARM’s news arrives
For sure, the news announced by ARM won’t find practical application by year-end. Developing new SoCs is a longer and more challenging process than you might think, so it’s hard to make any predictions. There is some possibility that something will be seen as early as 2022, but the most likely time horizon for massive deployment is 2023.