Arm has announced its new C2 CPUs for future Android chips as well as upgrades to its Mali GPUs that will take everything up a notch.
Arm CPU designs are the backbone of many Android smartphone chips, including the likes of MediaTek flagships and Google’s Tensor as well. This week, Arm has announced its C2-Ultra and C2-Pro CPU cores, delivering a 15% boost to single-thread performance and 12% faster app launches, as well as local AI that’s built into the CPU itself instead of offloading to a dedicated NPU or TPU.
Arm claims:
- Up to 1.7x performance improvement across the latest AI models
- Up to 15 percent higher single-thread performance
- 15 percent faster web browsing
- 12 percent faster application launch
- 12 percent higher multi-thread performance at the cluster level, supporting parallel activity across retrieval, model preparation and application execution
But the more exciting announcement here is the GPU, with Arm’s new Mali G2-Ultra NX claiming to deliver “desktop-class” performance with the help of “AI-native graphics.” Arm says that this new GPU “integrates neural acceleration directly into the graphics pipeline, helping developers deliver richer, more responsive visual experiences within the mobile power envelope and bring neural graphics into production faster.”
The new GPU as a whole sees a 14% boost in performance, but also integrates Unreal Engine 5 “MegaLights” while also being able to generate intermediate frames for smooth gameplay or upscale low-res games.
This could all show up in other form factors eventually, but it’s starting out in phones. Specifically, Xiaomi’s 18 Fold and its XRing O3 chip will be the first to integrate this new hardware, though games that take full advantage of it could be a ways out.
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