Arm releases Cortex-X3 & Cortex-A715, and Immortalis-G715 with hardware ray tracing
Arm has released a series of new chip core architectures, including three Armv9-based CPUs, and three GPUs, including Arm’s first flagship GPU with hardware ray tracing acceleration. Arm hopes the new kernel architecture will improve device performance and extend battery life.
Cortex-X3 and Cortex-A715 are upgraded versions of Cortex-X2 and Cortex-A710, both with 64-bit cores. Additionally, Arm dropped the AArch32 instruction set on both the Cortex-X3 and Cortex-A715, which means a full shift to 64-bit architecture. If customers still need to be compatible with the AArch32 instruction set, they can choose the A510 v2 version launched by Arm this time to provide support.
Compared with Cortex-X2, the performance of Cortex-X3 is increased by 22%, and the IPC is increased by 11%; Cortex-A715 and Cortex-A710, under the same power level and manufacturing process, the performance is increased by 5%, and the energy efficiency is increased by 20%; A510 v2 optimizes energy efficiency, reducing power consumption by 5% and increasing the frequency by 5% under the same performance. Arm said that the Cortex-A715 has reached the performance level of the Cortex-X1, and it will be of great help for mid-range processors when paired with an improved small core.
This time Arm also launched a new flagship GPU called “Immortalis”, which is no longer limited to the Mali series, which is by far the world’s largest GPU shipped, reaching 8 billion units. Immortalis is specifically designed for flagship smartphones, with the core of the design being to provide a great gaming experience, and one of the key features is the addition of ray tracing. Arm already offered software-based ray tracing on the Mali-G710 last year, and this time the Immortalis-G715 is the first Arm GPU to offer hardware-based ray tracing on mobile devices. According to Arm, Immortalis can have 10 to 16 cores, a 15% performance improvement over the previous generation.
In addition, Arm also introduced Mali-G715 and Mali-G615, the Mali-G715 has 7 to 9 cores, and the Mali-G615 has 6 cores or less. Arm said the Immortalis-G715, Mali-G715, and Mali-G615 will make up its new line of GPUs to drive performance improvements in next-generation mobile devices.
