ARM announces Cortex A72 core for smartphone processors

The British ARM has announced the Cortex A72 core for smartphone processors. Processor manufacturers should make Cortex A72 CPUs on a 16nm FinFet process. In addition to the new core, ARM also comes with a new GPU.

The Cortex A72 will be the successor to the Cortex A57 core that serves in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 and Samsung’s recent Exynos processors. Those processors will probably end up in all high-end smartphones this spring, such as the HTC One M9 and Samsung Galaxy S6. The A72 is for smartphones that come out in 2016.

ARM claims the Cortex A72 is 1.9 times faster than the A57, while at the same load it would be about 45 percent more fuel efficient. That gain is largely attributable to manufacturing on TSMC’s 16nm FinFet process. Now, in practice, that economy often doesn’t end up well, because processor makers and smartphone manufacturers often choose to increase the clock speed in order to make smartphones faster than predecessors.

The British company says the Cortex A72 offers “sustained performance” at 2.5GHz, while manufacturers can also clock it higher for short-term spikes in performance. ARM believes that A72, like its predecessor, is best used in a big.LITTLE configuration with some more energy-efficient processor cores, such as Cortex A53. This is now also happening with current socs for smartphones. The Cortex A72 can run on 64bit and is based on the ARMv8a architecture.

It is still unclear to what extent manufacturers will actually use the Cortex A72. In recent years, Qualcomm has often used its own micro-architecture on 32-bit and is said to be working on a 64-bit successor to its Krait core. According to unconfirmed rumors, Samsung also has plans in this direction, while Apple has only been working with its own cores for several years. Huawei invariably applies ARM’s designs.

In addition to the A72, ARM also presented a new GPU, the Mali-T880. This would be the most powerful GPU from ARM’s line-up to date. It is also made at TSMC at 16nm. The T880 offers 1.8 times the performance and consumes 40 percent less energy than the current Mali-T760 at the same load.