Arm’s next generation Immortalis is even more powerful and energy efficient

On Wednesday, core IP designer Arm announced the next generation of flagship smartphone CPU and GPU designs: the Cortex-X925 CPU and Immortalis G925 GPU. Both are direct successors to the Cortex-X4 and Immortalis G720 which currently power MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300 chipset inside flagship smartphones like the Vivo X100, X100 Pro, and Oppo Find X7.

Arm has changed the naming convention for its Cortex-X CPU design to highlight what it says is a much faster CPU design. It claims the X925’s single-core performance is 36 percent faster than the X4 (when benchmarked in Geekbench). Arm says it increased AI workload performance by 41 percent, i.e. code generation time, with up to 3MB of private L2 cache.

The Cortex-X925 brings a new generation of Cortex-A microarchitectures (the “small”) cores with it, too: the Cortex-A725, which Arm says has 35 percent better performance efficiency than last-gen’s A720 and 15 percent more power. Cortex-A520 efficiency.

It says Arm’s new Immortalis G925 GPU is “the most performing and efficient GPU” yet. It’s 37 percent faster in graphics applications compared to the last-generation G720, with 52 percent improved ray tracing performance with complex objects and 34 percent improved AI and machine learning workloads – all while using 30 percent less power.

For the first time, Arm will offer “optimized layouts” for its new CPU and GPU designs, which it says will be easier for device makers to “drop in” or implement in their own system on chip (SoC) layouts. Arm says this new physical implementation solution will help other companies bring their devices to market faster, which, if true, means we could see more devices with the Arm Cortex-X925 and/or Immortalis G925 than the few devices that have It was shipped with the last generation of it.

As a bonus for mobile game developers, Lumen ray tracing on Unreal Engine now supports Immortalis. It’s unclear whether this alone will be a big enough incentive for more game developers to add ray tracing to their mobile games or how those games will perform. As Andy Craigen, Arm’s director of product management, explained when the company launched its product Immortalis’ first hardware-based ray tracing build in 2022: “The challenge is that ray tracing technologies can use a significant amount of power, power and space across a mobile system-on-chip (SoC).”

We asked Arm about other mobile devices that use Immortalis GPUs for ray tracing and when we can expect to see a new phone that uses the Immortalis G925. Currently, the iQOO Neo 9pro uses the Dimensity 9300 processor, while the Xiaomi 14 series and OnePlus 12 series use the Cortex-X4 and Cortex-A720 processors in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Arm said it expects the new phones with their new core designs to become available in late 2024, but It is not possible to determine which companies are among them.

However, JC Hsu, senior vice president of MediaTek, was quoted in Arm’s press release as saying: “MediaTek is committed to supporting the latest Armv9 Cortex-X925 CPU and Immortalis-G925 GPU Client solution in its next-generation flagship chipset.” , Dimensity 9400, later this year.” So, this could mean that we will see a new Vivo or Oppo by the end of 2024.

Not too many phones currently use Arm’s Cortex and Immortalis designs together. Unlike the current-gen phones mentioned above, the MediaTek Dimensity 9200 chipset that powers the Vivo X90, X90 Pro, and Oppo Find But it’s more common to find Cortex paired with another GPU design in a mobile chip like Samsung’s Exynos 2400, which you’ll find in Samsung’s Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus.