From TechCrunch:
Arm, the company that designs the basic chip
architecture for most of the world’s smartphones, today announced the
launch of its next suite of designs for premium phones. It’ll be a while
before you’ll see the first phones that use chips based on this design,
but typically we see the first actual chips before the end of the year.
With this launch, the company is announcing the Cortex-A77 CPU, the
Mali-G77 GPU and a more energy efficient and powerful machine learning
processor.
Given recent trends, it’s no surprise that the new
Cortex-A77 doesn’t only focus on overall performance improvements,
though the company’s promise of 20% IPC performance improvement over the
last generation is nothing to sneer at. Thanks to a combination of
hardware and software optimizations, the Cortex-A77 now promises
significantly better machine learning performance, too.
Why
focus on that when the company also offers a machine learning
processor? Arm argues that most smartphones today don’t use a dedicated
neural processor. Indeed, the company argues that 85 percent of
smartphones today run machine learning workloads with only a CPU or a
CPU+GPU combo. And even when an accelerator is available, the CPU has to
hand that over to the accelerator, no matter whether that’s a GPU or a
dedicated machine learning chip....
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