ARM New Immortalis GPU For Flagship And Mali Chips For Midrange Smartphones With “5th Gen” Architecture

Alongside the high-power Cortex-X4, middle Cortex-A720, and small Cortex-A520 CPU cores for its big.LITTLE cluster, ARM also unveiled the second generation of its Immortalis GPU. These power Graphics Processing Units will go in midrange and flagship smartphones and electronics with displays.

ARM has announced the G720, a top-end Immortalis GPU for flagship devices. The company also introduced the new Mali-G720 and Mali-G620, which are high-end and mid-range GPUs respectively. Let's take a look at the GPUs that will be embedded inside the chipsets powering upcoming Android smartphones.

ARM Introduces Three New GPUs For Flagship, High-End, And Midrange Devices

ARM unveiled the second generation of its Immortalis GPU series. The company calls it the G720 and the GPU is meant for flagship devices.

ARM also announced GPUs for high-end and mid-range chips. The new Mali G720, Mali G620, and even the top-end Immortalis G720 have a new architecture, which ARM is mysteriously calling "5th Gen".

The ARM Immortalis-G720 GPUs will feature up to 10 graphics cores. The Mali-G720 can be configured with between 6 and 9 cores. The midrange Mali-G620 will have up to 5 cores. Needless to say, the number of cores will largely depend on the chipset designer.

The ARM Immortalis G720 promises to improve support for Ray Tracing, especially in mobile games. ARM has indicated that it is working with Tencent Games and MediaTek to develop Smart Global Illumination (SmartGI) as an industry standard. If ARM succeeds, mobile games would get visually better without excessively burdening onboard GPUs.

What Is The 5th Gen Architecture In New ARM GPUs?

ARM hasn't shared many details about the new architecture on which the just-announced GPUs are based. However, the latest generation has the Deferred Vertex Shading pipeline.

The latest addition to the ARM GPUs promises to reduce the load on memory with a 33 percent bandwidth reduction in Genshin Impact, 26 percent on Fortnite, and 41 percent on Elven Ruins. Incidentally, Elven Ruins isn't out yet. Epic Games offered a small preview of the game just to showcase the capabilities of the new and improved Unreal Engine.

As the name suggests, the Deferred Vertex Shading pipeline reduces the load on memory by allowing the onboard GPU to take up some of the workloads. This helps reduce power usage, and consequentially, heat generated is lesser too.

ARM claims the 5th gen architecture can offer 15 percent higher peak performance and 15 percent higher performance per watt on average. Real-world performance and impact of the new ARM GPUs, however, remain unverified.

It is interesting to note that Intel Foundries could soon start the fabrication of chipsets based on ARM CPUs and GPUs. Currently, only TSMC and Samsung are the two main fabricators. A third player could significantly streamline the chip supply chain.