Arm Chip Cumulative Shipments Surpass 190 Billion Units
First Armv9-based Cortex, Mali, CoreLink announced
Arm, full-scale attempt to expand beyond mobile areas such as laptops


On the 26th, Arm held an online press conference and announced the 'Total Compute Solution' and new CPU, GPU, and system IP based on the 'Armv9' architecture announced in March, with the aim of optimizing the entire system and strengthening specialized processing.

Total Compute Solutions provide a holistic approach to optimizing the entire system, building on the three pillars of Arm’s Total Compute strategy: performance, developer access, and security. This applies across hardware IP, physical IP, software, tools and standards.

“We are committed to implementing the Armv9 architecture everywhere (laptop, mobile, desktop, cloud) and maximizing performance with system-level design,” said Paul Williamson, general manager of Arm’s client business unit. “By building security-based implementations across all use cases, we will build highly reliable digital services for the next decade.”

◇ First Armv9-based CPU, GPU, and system IP revealed

At the press conference that day, Arm began a 10-year roadmap by announcing the first Armv9 architecture-based ▲Cortex™ CPU ▲Mali™ GPU ▲CoreLink™ system IP.

The new CPU, 'Arm Cortex-X2', delivers 30% better performance than the latest Android flagship smartphones and is the most powerful Arm CPU ever released. It also has scalability across premium smartphones and laptops, enabling Arm's partners to design purpose-built compute based on market requirements.

The 'Arm Cortex-A710' is the first Armv9-based 'big' CPU, and is 30% more energy efficient and 10% more performance than the Cortex-A78. Users can experience an improved user experience while running high-spec smartphone applications for longer. The 'Arm Cortex-A510', announced simultaneously, is Arm's first high-efficiency 'LITTLE' core, and provides a 35% performance improvement and more than 3x the machine learning performance. Jeong Seong-hun, FAE director at Arm Korea, explained this as "similar performance to the previous generation big core."

Director Jeong said that the core of the Armv9-A CPU cluster is “the new DSU (DynamIQ Shared Unit) called the ‘DSU-110,’” adding that “the DSU-110 provides efficiency, scalability, performance supporting up to eight Cortex-X2 CPUs, security, and machine learning capabilities.”

Arm also announced plans to transition all of its mobile big and little cores to 64-bit by 2023. In advance of this, Arm’s global partners are preparing to ensure that all applications will have 64-bit support by the end of this year.

Arm announced the high-performance GPU, 'Arm Mali-G710', targeting the premium smartphone and Chromebook markets along with the CPU. It offers a 20% performance boost for compute-intensive experiences like AAA games, and a 35% performance boost for a range of machine learning-related tasks, including improved image quality for new camera and video modes. In addition, it showcased GPUs for a range of devices, including the sub-premium GPU, the 'Arm Mali-G610', the mid-range GPU, the 'Arm Mali-G510' entry GPU, and the 'Arm Mali-G310'.

Arm’s interconnect technology plays a key role in improving system performance. The latest ‘CoreLink CI-700 Coherent Interconnect’ and ‘CoreLink NI-700 Network-on-Chip Interconnect’ work with Arm CPU, GPU, and NPU IP to improve systems across SoC solutions.

CoreLink CI-700 and CoreLink NI-700 provide hardware-level support for new Armv9-A features such as Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), enabling enhanced security, improved bandwidth, and lower latency.

Meanwhile, Arm said its chip partners shipped 7.3 billion Arm-based chips in the fourth quarter of 2020, up 22% from the same period last year. For 2020 as a whole, 25 billion Arm-based chips were shipped, up 13% from 2019.

The cumulative shipment of Arm-based chips has now exceeded 190 billion units. The cumulative shipment of GPUs has also exceeded 8 billion units. More than 1 billion of them were shipped in 2020. In addition, Arm Mali GPUs maintained the number one position in global GPU shipments.