ARM made some announcements at the Computex 2017 in Taiwan, replacing the old Cortex A-73 and Cortex A-53 CPUs with the new A-75 and A-55 lineup which will power new mobile phones of early 2018. Also announced was a brand new GPU, the Mali G-72. The Cortex A-73 was a high-performance chip that was found on high-end chipsets, is now replaced by the A-75 with improvements seen all across the board. While the A-55 will have to be very impressive to replace the heavily used Cortex A-53.
But the more interesting announcement among all these was surely the new DynamIQ technology used in the new CPUs. In simple terms, this impressive tech will allow the different types of CPU cores (high-efficience, high-power) to pair and work in the same cluster. Now it supports up to 8 CPUs in a single cluster instead of the 4 it previously supported. so now you can have combinations like 1+7 or 2+ 6 or 4 + 4 or even just 1 + 4.
Talking about the ARM Cortex-A75, it improves on its predecessor in all areas which is evident in the benchmarks. ARM says devices with the Cortex-A75 will see a 22% improvement compared to the A-73 with the same frequency. A-75 will also be more power efficient in bringing more speed. The A-75 will be used in large screen devices like Chromebooks and mini laptops as well.
The Cortex-A55 is a much significant upgrade over the A-53. It gives 2x the memory performance of its incumbent. The CPU for low-end devices is also 15% more power efficient
Both the Cortex A55 and Cortex A75 are built on the new ARM v8.2-A architecture keeping in mind emerging technologies like AI and Virtual Reality.
Now for the GPU, the new Mali G-72 is 25% more effective in saving battery and now manufacturers can add more GPU cores in the same die area. Right now 32 cores are supported and as a result, we may see top-end devices with even better graphics capabilities.
The new DynamIQ architecture might take time to get implemented but we can expect devices with the Cortex A-75 and A-55 to arrive in early 2018.
