ARM unveils "laptop-class" Cortex-A76 7 nm CPU

ARM is the company that supplies every major SoC maker with the Cortex CPUs and Mali GPUs. This year, ARM is making the jump to the 7 nm manufacturing process with the newly announced Cortex-A76 CPU. It is not just a small update to the series, even though the denominator was changed from 75 to 76. The A76 features a brand new microarchitecture designed by ARM’s Austin team.

Being built from scratch using a totally new microarchitecture, the Cortex-A76’s major selling point is its “laptop-class” performance with handheld efficiency. These new CPUs are specifically designed to power the emerging “always connected” Windows on ARM PCs running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SOCs. ARM promises 35% increased performance, 40% improved power efficiency and 4 times increased machine learning workloads. All this would be possible thanks to the 7 nm manufacturing process from TSMC, which would allow the ARM CPUs to break the 3 GHz barrier for the first time.

Additionally, ARM will also launch the Mali-G76 GPU, which promises 30% increased performance and higher efficiency over the current generation, plus the Mali-V76 VPU that will offer support for 8K resolutions on a wider selection of mobile devices.

This new microarchitecture will be the baseline for at least two upcoming generations. As ARM has constantly delivered 20-25% performance improvements for its CPUs on a year-by-year basis for the last 5 years now, the next few years will be crucial for the advent of the first desktop-grade CPUs fit into mobile chips.

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