This morning, ARM released its latest and strongest Cortex-A72 architecture and its matching Mali-T880 GPU. The new architecture uses the ARMv8-A instruction set and 16nm FinFET process to support large and small cores. Compared with the A15 architecture, the performance of the new architecture is 3.5 times higher and the energy consumption is 75% lower.

First of all, the new CPU does not use the same ARMv8 instruction set as the Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57 architectures that have been logged on to mobile phones at present, but uses the improved ARMv8-A instruction set, which is compatible with 32-bit applications. ARM announced that the peak performance of the new A72 core is 3.5 times that of the A15 core, while the power consumption is reduced by 75%, Positioning includes computing solutions from smart phones to large screen devices.

The reason why the new architecture can reduce power consumption is that ARM uses the new 16nm FinFET process. Compared with the current 20nm process, the processor with the 16nm process can achieve a maximum dominant frequency of 2.5GHz. At the same time, ARM will also add big LITTLE is designed to obtain the best energy efficiency ratio. ARM claims that the power consumption of the processor can be further reduced by 40%~60% after using the large and small core design, depending on the specific situation.

In order to deploy tasks, ARM also released a new CoreLink CCI-500 cache provisioning connector. After joining the CCI-500, the large and small core design can improve system bandwidth and provide faster cache processing performance. The performance of the CCI-500 is 30% higher than that of the previous generation CCI-400, and supports higher resolution.

In addition to the CPU, ARM is releasing its latest high-end GPU Mali-T880 this time. ARM claims that the performance of the T880 is twice that of the current T760 (currently used in Samsung's Exynos 5433 and MediaTek's MT6752 processors). ARM also claims that the power consumption of the new GPU is 40% lower than that of the T760 under the same load.

Although ARM does not clearly point out, if the A72 core is to build a large and small core design, it should form a team with the A53. In addition, other components should also be matched with the Mali-V550 video processor and Mali-DP550 display processor. Mobile devices using the A72 architecture and T880 GPU could officially meet us next year as soon as possible.

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