The New ARM Cortex-A73 Will Power 2017’s Smartphones, Tablets And VR Headsets

The new ARM Cortex-A73 and its companion Mali-G71 graphics processor are more efficient than ever, with stronger single-core computing performance and stronger consistent performance over time. It’ll start appearing in top-end smartphones and tablets from next year onwards, and it represents a significant jump forward in the power available inside our portable gadgets. Here is why that’s important.

According to Anandtech, the Cortex-A73 is roughly 30 per cent more powerful than the previous A72 core, with ARM also saying the chip is 20 per cent more energy efficient and 25 per cent smaller, both metrics that should make a big difference with packaging and thermal control inside your next super-thin smartphone. ARM sits further up the R&D pipeline than the smartphone vendors you know and love, and will supply this core design to companies like Apple and Samsung for them to use within their own Samsung Exynos or Apple-branded A-series system-on-chips.

At the same time, ARM also has a new high-end graphics chipset in the Mali-G71 — with 50 per cent better performance than the GPUs in 2016’s ARM-based devices like the Samsung Galaxy S7, and a brand new architecture (called ‘Bitfrost’ — awesome) meaning the best graphics performance of any ARM chip ever. The combination of the two means that ARM’s new system-on-chips are finally going to be powerful enough for immersive mobile virtual reality and widespread 4K resolution on smartphones. [Anandtech]


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