Arm aims for the laptop market with new processors

About a year ago, Microsoft and Qualcomm announced that Windows 10 would be coming to devices with ARM processors, specifically the Snapdragon 835. One year later, our own Rich Woods doesn't believe the platform will take off, and even HP has released an Intel version of its HP Envy x2.

Despite an apparent lack of confidence from some companies, Arm has today announced a new suite of products, which the company believes "makes any gap in laptop performance a non-issue with a CPU design that delivers a staggering increase in year-over-year performance".

Starting with the Cortex-A76 CPU, which is built on the company's DynamIQ technology, Arm is touting a 35% increase in performance over last year's Cortex-A75 along with a 40% increase in power efficiency. On top of that, the processor offers four times more compute performance for AI and machine learning tasks. The company also says the latest offering brings two times the performance for laptops compared to the Cortex-A73.

Graphics performance is also about to get a significant boost, as the new Mali-G76 GPU promises 30% more energy efficiency and performance density, as well as 2.7 times the performance for machine learning compared to the Mali-G72. The new GPU has the double the execution lanes per engine, allowing the same task to be performed faster and with less energy cost, even with fewer cores.

Finally, the new Mali-V76 VPU is capable of playing up to 8K Ultra HD video, four 4K video streams, or 16 1080p Full HD streams at 60 frames per second, offering twice the decode performance of the Mali-V61. The V76 can also encode 8K video, but only at 30 frames per second.

The company seems to be very confident in the work done on its new products, with Kristen Lisa, Senior PR Manager at Arm, having said:

Our new client IP platform solution for 2019 has generated a level of excitement within our ecosystem which I have never seen during my 5+ years at Arm thanks to the possibilities it offers for increased productivity, immersive AR/VR and gaming, AI/ML, and UHD 8K viewing experiences on more devices.

It will be interesting to see how well future Windows 10 devices with these processors will perform, and if they can make a meaningful impact in the laptop market.

Source: Arm (1), (2), (3), (4) via Tom's Hardware