TechTheDay

Last Thursday, Arm has announced the Cortex-A76, the newest chip generation that promises to make your devices 35% faster than the current models. Arm’s intellectual property group’s president, Rene Haas, gave a statement last Thursday in San Francisco, during a press conference.

“We think we’ve turned a corner relative to the overall performance curve,” he said, promising that the new chips are going to provide performance that’s usually only seen on laptops and would be able to go head-to-head with other high-end processors, like Intel’s Core i7 chips. Arm’s design is used in current Android phones, though they aren’t as good as Apple’s, even though Arm was originally co-founded by Apple 28 years ago. Right now, Apple’s A11 Bionic Chip blows all the competition out of the water. Qualcomm uses Arm’s chip designs.

Arm Benchmark

Geekbench.com has been benchmarking Android processors and chip for a while now, with the baseline score being 4000 (which is how high an Intel Core i7-6600U would score). According to the trend that they have charted, the newer processors can score double than a Core i7 in their Multi-Core tests. Single Core, however, shows that the most recent processors from Qualcomm showing lower scores than the baseline. Compare this to how Apple scores in their benchmarking charts and you’ll see a clear difference: Apple’s newer chips perform just like a Core i7 and in Multi-Core testing, scores 25% higher than their best rivals. All this is promised to change, however, with the Cortex-A76.

Mike Filippo, the lead processor architect at Arm, said in a statement: “I expect we’ll do well against Apple.” He added later that Apple isn’t their target, however, but Intel. The promised 35% increase in performance is the minimum, and users may experience up to 70% boost in mathematical tasks while fast memory accessing may get up to 95% boost. Right now, the Cortex-A76 can perform as well as the current Intel Core i5 (i5 7300). if they configured it by giving it more cache memory, Filippo said that it could compete even against the i7.

The design for this new architecture was started four years ago: “This is a brand-new microarchitecture. We’ve paid maniacal focus to make sure every transistor we put into this design pays for itself in terms of performance.”

Other Announcements

The company also announced two other chips to go with the Cortex-A76: the Mali-V76 video chip and the Mali-G76 graphics processor. The graphics chip is said to have 30% more speed than the ones currently in the market. The video chip offers the ability to display 8K resolution. Google tested the new chips with their VR product, Daydream, and announces that they’re very impressed with the results. Daydream product manager, Rahul Pradad, said in a statement: “We have console level graphics with the G76.”

Changes Ahead

Arm chips have always been viewed as weak by many: Their partnership with Apple, for example, produced the chips for the Newton personal digital assistants. Arm expects views to change with the Cortex-A76, especially for laptops that will be benefiting from what it can do.

Microsoft’s optimistic and hopes that the new Arm chip works with newer laptops that were designed to turn on faster, feature a better battery life than it’s predecessors, and can connect to mobile networks. Should Arm’s new chip delivers it could mean significant changes to how people use laptops and mobile devices. Microsoft corporate’s vice president, Matt Barlow, said about the new laptops: “It’s the next-generation PC that combines the best of both of these worlds. It just changes the way you work. You can go on a two-day business trip and leave that power cord at home.”