ARM Cortex-X4 Is The fastest Mobile CPU Yet: big.LITTLE Config To Get Cortex-A720, A520 CPU Cores

ARM has introduced new CPUs in the Prime, Power, and Efficiency categories. The CPU maker has announced the high-power Cortex-X4, middle Cortex-A720, and small Cortex-A520.

ARM, the go-top supplier of CPUs that majorly go into smartphones, electronics, and portable devices, is upgrading to the conventional big.LITTLE CPU configuration. Let's look at the new CPUs that would power Android smartphones, Smart TVs, routers, and many other electronics in the near future.

ARM Unveils Cortex-X4, Cortex-A720, And Cortex-A520

The new Cortex-X4 is the "Prime" core, which boasts the highest clock speeds in any CPU cluster. It will take on heavy single-threaded tasks.

ARM promises the new X4 offers 15 percent higher performance than the X3 on equal power (which itself went 25% faster than the X2). The X4 boasts of a massive 40 percent reduction in power use for equal performance.

Despite the power savings promised, the X4 is primarily built for speed. ARM Assures the Cortex-X4 is the fastest CPU core it has ever designed. The ARM Cortex-X4 is expected to reach peak clock speeds of 3.4GHz.

The Cortex-A720 CPU cores are optimized for efficiency. They are better than the A700 cores. The A720 is claimed to be 20 percent more efficient than the A715, which itself was 20 percent more efficient than the A710.

The A720 cores will remain the most active CPUs in any big.LITTLE CPU cluster. In fact, they will do most of the heavy lifting for multi-threaded workloads, and AMD assures these CPUs will execute tasks efficiently.

The Cortex-A520 is designed so that two cores can share execution units to take up as little space on the silicon as possible. The other design goal was to reduce power consumption and the A520 is claimed to be 22 percent more efficient than the A510. On high-end chipsets, these CPU cores will most possibly be tasked with background tasks.

ARM big.LITTLE CPU Configuration Revised And Upgraded?

The majority of high-end chipsets have an octa-core CPU cluster with 1+3+4 or 1+4+3 configurations. This standard configuration will likely change to 1+5+2.

A new chipset with ARM Cortex-X4, A720, and A520 cores in a 1+5+2 configuration offered a 27 percent boost on Geekbench 6's multi-threaded test compared to a current 1+3+4 CPU cluster with ARM Cortex-X3, A716, A510 CPU when running at the same frequency with the same amount of cache. Factoring in the node advantage, the performance jump is even higher.

All the new ARM CPUs have been optimized for ARMv9. In other words, ARM has essentially dropped support for the old 32-bit ARM instruction set.