ARM is the company that’s responsible for nearly all the processor architectures used in nearly all mobile devices on the market, from iPhones to Samsung smartphones. The company used Computex 2016 to announce a new CPU and GPU that it intends to see in high-end flagship phones as early as next year. But what’s surprising is that both the CPU and GPU are designed with virtual reality in mind.
The new Mali-G71 GPU will use the company’s new third-generation architecture called Bifrost and will allow for 50 percent higher graphics performance, 20 percent better power efficiency, and 40 percent more performance per square mm over ARM’s previous Mali GPU. Furthermore, ARM states that the new Mali-G71 can match laptop GPUs like Nvidia’s GTX 940M and can support 4k resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate and 4ms graphics pipeline latency. ARM says that the GPU architecture is its “most scalable GPU to date”.
Meanwhile, ARM also announced the new Cortex-A73 Core CPU which focuses on power efficiency. As a result it is 30% more efficient than the previous than the previous Cortex A-72 while offering 1.3 times the peak level performance of the A-72. This results in the A-73 offering over twice the amount of performance for its power budget and is also sustainable. VR and AR applications often produce dropped frames and inconsistent performance, something ARM hopes to remedy with the sustainable performance of the A73.
ARM expects chips to move into production at the end of the year and appear in shipping devices in early 2017. The GPU technology will trickle down to lower-end chips, but ARM isn’t upgrading its low-end CPU architectures
