We don’t know yet if there will be any 3nm flagship processor in the next year. Apparently, companies such as Qualcomm and MediaTek will stick with the 4 nm standard for another year. But this can easily change as TSMC is planning to begin its mass manufacturing of 3 nm chips, and Samsung already started. However, one thing we know, is that next year’s flagship SoCs will bring the next generation of ARMv9 cores to surpass the Cortex-X2 and Cortex-A710. As a result, ARM has already unveiled the new Cortex-X3 and the Cortex-A715 cores which will pave the year for next year’s flagship.
The Cortex-X3 and Cortex-A715 are here as the company’s second generation of ARMv9 processor cores. The company decided to not bring a new generation for the Cortex-A510 and is making some small adjustments. This is not a big surprise, after all, the ARMv8 standard stuck with the Cortex-A55 cores for years. So let’s focus on the big novelties presented today.
ARM Cortex-X3 and Cortex-A715 bring many improvements
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ARM introduces the Cortex-X3 as its BIG core for flagships. This is the company’s third year of double-digit IPC growth (Instructions per cycle). Just like its predecessors, the Cortex-X3 will ensure peak performance. In comparison to the current flagship SoCs (Snapdragon 8 Gen series, Dimensity 9000, Exynos 2200) that have the Cortex-X2, the new standard will bring a 25% jump in performance. As for Windows on ARM designs, the improvements mean 34%.
The new Cortex-A715 core completes ARM’s transition away from 32-bit processors. This allows the engineering team to make the instruction decoder hardware 4 times smaller. The company states that the ARMv9 standard is more predictable and regular than ARMv8 and the new cores have full support for it. The Cortex-A715 is 20% more power-efficient than the Cortex-A710 at the same performance. It can deliver 5% more performance for the same power usage.
Last but not least, the Cortex-A510 got a small optimization to be 5% more power efficient in comparison to the 2021 branch. We expect these chips to appear in the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, in the Exynos 2300, and MediaTek’s next flagship SoC.