ARM today announced the Cortex A73 processor core and the Mali G71 GPU, which will bring dramatic gaming and virtual reality improvements to next year’s high-end smartphones.
ARM says the A73 delivers 30% more sustained power when compared to the A72, in addition to 30% more power efficiency. The processor relies on ARM’s 10nm FinFET process and supports clock speeds up to 2.8 GHz. The A73 can be paired with the A53 or A35 processor cores in big.LITTLE configurations to suit device processing needs.
The Mali G71 uses ARM’s new Bifrost architecture and targets gaming and virtual reality applications. ARM says it delivers 1.5 times the performance of the Mali T880 GPU and offers new APIs for developers to put to use. It adds support for OpenCL2.0 with full hardware coherency, and will work with Vulkan, which is at the heart of Android N. ARM said the chips will reach flagship handsets beginning in 2017.
