Upcoming ARM Cortex-A73 could support HDR and 4K UHD at 120 Hz

ARM Holdings announced at Computex 2016 its SoC plans for 2017 including the Cortex-A73 and Mali-G71 GPU that future flagship smartphones, tablets, conferencing systems, and smart TVs will likely be based on. The British company recently released more details on a new "Egil" processor with the aforementioned integrated GPU.

Accordingly, the flexible video processor will scale in performance depending on the price or class of the device. Thus, it should be capable of 1080p playback at up to 80 Hz or even 4K UHD at up to 120 Hz depending on the number of activated cores. The chip will also support 10-bit encoding and decoding of the HEVC (H.265) and VP9 codecs for HDR playback in multiple simultaneous instances for features like videoconferencing. Production is expected to be at TSMC using a 16 nm FinFET process for better performance-per-Watt.

Native support for HDR encoding and decoding was revealed as an important feature on the latest generation of Nvidia Pascal, AMD Polaris, and Intel Kaby Lake GPUs. HDR allows for deeper colors and more vibrant videos, though it requires high-end TV sets or displays that support it.

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