Despite being the reason for modern computing to become the way it is thanks to the introduction of the big.LITTLE architecture and subsequent offerings, Arm has decided to reinvent its compute platform so to speak and a major part of it has been revealed at COMPUTEX 2024.
Let’s start with the reasons behind their move. The major driving factor is that in the AI computing era, AI models evolves drastically quicker than leaps of improvement made by hardware. Thus, failure to address the lack of software stack offered by a company is going to cause it to stagnate and potentially lose out on everything.
Therefore, the new Arm Compute Subsystems (CSS) for Client that tailors towards smartphones and PCs (some of you might know CSS from the enterprise side Neoverse counterpart).
Through this, they aim to allow silicon partners to quickly develop and market their Arm-based solutions with new performance levels, efficiency, and accessibility. And here’s one of the new stuff – the Immortalis-G925 GPU with 37% higher performance, 34% quicker AI inferencing speed, and a 52% increase in RT workload.
There’s another flagship CPU to match the Immortalist-G925 and that’s the Cortex-X925 CPU with 36% higher single-thread performance and a 41% increase in AI performance.
But that’s not all because not everything has to be an ultra-premium flagship so for the lower tiers, we see the new Cortex-A725 with allegedly 35% greater performance efficiency including game as well as a round of refresh brought to the Cortex-A520 lineup with updated DSU-120 that also goes into the power efficiency and scalability factors.
Among the Armv9.2 CPUs and Immortalist GPUs, the main highlight (at least for me) is the introduction of the Arm Kleidi software stack and libraries with KleidiAI tackling AI and KleidiCV doing computer vision.
The new offering will fully integrate into the existing ecosystem of popular AI frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow to bring out even more potential for LLMs like Meta Llama 3 and Phi-3.
With the regular and expected new round of hardware that meets with heavy prioritization towards the development of software, Arm CSS for Client and Kleidi is Arm’s answer for the AI computing era.
