Arm goes off road... map: 5nm Cortex-X1 touted for phone, tablet, laptop processors needing Apple-level oomph

Arm today will unveil its Cortex-A78 CPU core, lined up for next-gen phones, tablets, and laptops, and go off roadmap with its Cortex-X1, both using a 5nm process node. It will also announce its Ethos-N78 processing unit for accelerating machine-learning workloads on devices, and its Mali-G78 GPU for high-end handhelds. Let's …

[Charlie Clark]

Gradual improvements

The A78 is a step up from the A77 introduced last year: nothing spectacularly different, just a whole lot of bandwidth improvements and changes to improve its efficiency.

Without any major new developments in hardware features (clock speeds, new geometries, new hardware acceleration options), this is pretty much what you'd expect. But what is different, in comparison with say Intel, is the speed at which those changes are delivered and presumably how low the overhead is for them.

[diodesign]

"new geometries"

Actually, the A78 and X1 are targeting 5nm, rather than 7nm, which I've added to the story.

The overall architecture hasn't really changed. It's taking advantage of, say, TSMC's upcoming 5nm process node.

C.

[Anonymous Coward]

It would take me an arm AND a leg to understand all data in the article.