What innovations does Arm’s comprehensive computing strategy for 2022 bring?

In 2019, Arm launched the Total Compute strategy, which adopts a holistic, solution-centric SoC design approach. By going beyond individual IP elements to design and optimize systems to create use case-driven solutions, it will power computing innovations in different industries in the next decade.

In 2021, with the birth of the Armv9 instruction set and the release of IPs such as Cortex-X2/A710/A510, Arm has entered the era of full computing for the first time and marks the full arrival of the 64-bit computing era.

时隔一年，Arm在2022年继续更新了全面计算解决方案，并作出了多项重要创新。其中包括全新旗舰产品 Immortalis GPU，实现了基于硬件的光线追踪功能，为手游体验带来了显著增强。此外，旗舰型CPU Cortex-X3的性能也得到了进一步增强，从而更好地支持手机和笔记本在内的多项终端产品。

Added hardware ray tracing capabilities to the GPU

Arm has released a new flagship GPU product, Immortalis. This new series of products inherits the profound technical accumulation of the Mali series of GPUs with the highest shipments in the world (over 8 billion units), and has been configured and enhanced to provide the ultimate mobile 3D experience.

The Immortalis-G715 is Arm’s first GPU to offer hardware-based ray tracing support on mobile devices. Ray tracing technology can generate realistic lighting and shadows, providing a better gaming experience.

However, there are still some challenges in ray tracing technology, mainly due to the trade-off between power consumption, efficiency and area. Ray tracing on Immortalis-G715 only uses 4% of the shader core area, while achieving more than 300% performance improvement through hardware acceleration.

Last year’s Mali-G710 already enabled software-based ray tracing support. MediaTek has already taken advantage of this feature in its flagship Dimensity 9000 chipset, which is used in flagship smartphones such as OPPO’s Find X5 Pro Dimensity Edition.

Paul Williamson, senior vice president and general manager of the terminal business unit of Arm, said that earlier this year, Arm and OPPO demonstrated ray tracing at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, and he also said that major OEMs are currently interested in and actively support future ray tracing. In addition to hardware support, its partner and developer ecosystem is also ready or about to be ready, and has been widely recognized by industry partners.

For example, Nick Penwarden, Vice President of Engineering at Epic Games, said: “At Arm, we are committed to continuous innovation, and we are pleased that Arm’s new comprehensive computing solutions, including Immortalis GPUs, provide new options for developers. With enhanced capabilities and improved performance, we can’t wait to see how the Unreal Engine community will use these advanced technologies to provide first-class experiences on future mobile devices.”

Dr. Jingquan Xu, Vice President and General Manager of Wireless Communications Business Unit at MediaTek, also said: “Arm’s new Immortalis GPU demonstrates hardware-level ray tracing capabilities. Paired with the powerful Cortex-X3 CPU, we expect MediaTek’s high-end flagship mobile SoC to take the experience to the next level, bringing users top mobile gaming performance and higher productivity.”

Ralph Hauwert, senior vice president and general manager of Core Unity and Cloud Business Unit at Unity, said: “Unity and Arm share a common goal of delivering the ultimate gaming experience. Arm’s new comprehensive computing solutions and the new flagship Arm Immortalis GPU are key to achieving this goal, enabling more real-time 3D experiences beyond gaming. Arm’s well-known sustained performance and energy efficiency technology, combined with Unity, will enable creators to create high-quality 3D visual experiences and realize innovative immersive content.”

In addition to the Immortalis GPUs that support hardware ray tracing, Arm also announced the new Mali-G715 GPU and G615, adding some new features, including variable rate shading technology for significant energy savings and further gaming performance, as well as improved engines. The main difference between the G615 and G715 is that the G615 supports 6 or less cores, while the G715 supports 7-9 cores.

Variable rate shading technology provides significant energy savings and performance improvements in graphics and visual effects by optimizing rendering. Essentially, it takes a scene and focuses the rendering where it needs to be focused, and renders it at a fine pixel granularity. Typically, this is the main focus in the game. Areas that require less focus, such as background scenery, are rendered at a coarser pixel granularity. The game scene can still maintain its perceived visual quality, but energy will be saved. Actual test results show that a 40% increase in frames per second (FPS) can be achieved.

Processor performance and energy efficiency continue to improve

The first Armv9 CPUs were launched in 2021. This year, Arm responded to market demands for performance and efficiency with a new extended CPU cluster. The new CPU design is designed to increase peak performance and provide excellent sustained performance and efficiency. 

Targeting a wide range of benchmarks and application markets, the new Arm Cortex-X3 delivers up to 25% performance improvement over the latest flagship Android smartphones and 34% performance improvement over the latest mainstream laptops.

The Arm Cortex-A715 focuses on efficient performance. Compared with the Cortex-A710, its energy efficiency is improved by 20% and its performance is improved by 5%, reaching an important milestone comparable to the performance of the Cortex-X1.

Given the importance of efficient performance, the Cortex-A715 CPU cluster adopts a big.LITTLE™-based configuration, which is also the most commonly used heterogeneous processing architecture in consumer devices around the world.

The Arm Cortex-A510 based on the Armv9 architecture was launched in 2021. This is the first efficient small core launched by Arm in four years. This year's updated version reduces power consumption by 5% while maintaining the same performance. At the same time, compared with the previous generation last year, the updated DSU-110 supports 50% more CPU cluster cores, achieving scalability for different levels of consumer devices.

Williamson reiterated the importance of 64-bit. He said: "Major app stores in China have indicated that by August this year, all new apps should be 64-bit. In fact, 64-bit apps can provide users with the best experience and can speed up app startup time by 20%. Therefore, any app that has not transitioned to 64-bit will disappoint users due to poor performance. We expect all apps to transition to 64-bit."

The China Golden Label Alliance, in which companies such as OPPO, VIVO and Xiaomi participate, recently announced that China's computing ecosystem and application ecosystem are fully ready for 64-bit, which means that flagship smartphones in the next few years must be guaranteed to be fully 64-bit designs to ensure optimal efficiency and the strongest performance.

Project Volterra helps Windows on Arm developer ecosystem grow

Williamson also mentioned Microsoft's Project Volterra, which was released this year. This is a mini development host based on Qualcomm processors developed by Microsoft. In addition, Microsoft also stated that it will launch Arm-native versions of development tools, including Visual Studio, VSCode, Visual C++, .NET, Windows Terminal, and WSL and WSA for Linux and Android. "This means that developers can now develop Arm-based applications in an Arm-based Windows environment." Williamson said.

A comprehensive computing strategy for the future

Williamson introduced Arm's future product roadmap. The large-core CPU product line includes Hunter and Chaberton. The GPU product line includes Titan and Krake. It also includes system IP to ensure low-latency memory paths and system-level cache performance. For security, Arm is adding support for isolation and virtualization, which is consistent with Android's pKVM initiative.

Williamson emphasized that comprehensive computing is Arm's commitment to the future, which is much more important than its various IP components. Therefore, Arm not only invests in IP products to improve performance, but also makes additional investments in multiple areas such as developers and security. Comprehensive computing 2022 is the concrete practice of this strategy.