Arma’s next chips should bring faster on-device AI in future phones

Chipmaker Arm on Wednesday unveiled a new set of processors that will boost the performance and speed of future phones. They were built specifically to generate artificial intelligence on devices.

Other chipmakers like Qualcomm are including Arm processors in their full chipsets – for example, the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which powers premium phones like the Samsung Galaxy S24 series, includes eight Arm Cortex processor cores. Arm’s next generation of CPUs and GPUs promise improvements in speed and performance, and will better empower artificial intelligence on devices, such as Samsung’s Galaxy AI and tools that add or remove elements from images.

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The three new systems are based on the company’s latest Armv9.2 architecture. The top-of-the-range Cortex X925, made on a 3-nanometer matrix, scored 36% better in Geekbench tests than an anonymous premium Android phone from 2023. The mid-range Cortex A725 has 35% better performance than its predecessor (Cortex A720). and the cheaper Cortex A525 is 15% more efficient than the Cortex A520.

Arm says these chips are built for artificial intelligence, and the Cortex X925 has a 41% faster time to first token – an AI speed metric that measures first output after a prompt is entered – using the tiny-Llama language model than the Cortex X4. While Arm acknowledged that any AI processing consumes more power on devices than less intensive use (e.g. web browsing), the company said the increase in processor performance offsets the higher power draw of AI, which would benefit phone and device makers I’m eager to ride the wave of artificial intelligence with more and more implementations.

The company is also announcing more Kleidi software libraries focused on artificial intelligence and computer vision that chipset manufacturers can choose from when deploying their processors. But potentially more exciting for other devices is Arm’s commitment to adding more Windows apps to run natively on its processors – this time by adding Spotify, Chrome, Audacity, and a few others.

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Arm also introduced its latest high-end GPU to pair with the CPU chips, the 14-core Immortalis G925, which is the third generation of chips to support ray tracing to render realistic light and reflections and now includes Unreal’s Lumen Raytracing technology on the chip. Arm claims this GPU has 52% better ray tracing performance than its predecessor, the 12-core Immortalis G720.

Arm noted that these graphical improvements lead to better video performance on Android platforms, such as 10% power savings when watching YouTube videos.

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