ARM launches new Cortex, Mali processors to boost AI and VR mobile tech.

ARM has unveiled a set of new processors to provide the brainpower for our mobile devices to cope with advanced artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) technologies.

Today, the British semiconductor giant said the new Cortex-A75 and Cortex-A55 processors, alongside the new Mali-G72 graphics processor, have been designed to "address the changing nature of computers driven by AI and other more human like experiences."

ARM says that by providing low-power, efficient and powerful processors, device vendors will be able to explore the possibilities of distributed intelligence, and the new Cortex-A architecture enables system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture designers to scale up to eight cores in a single cluster.

When ARM showed up at Computex last year, it brought a bundle of smartphone processors that pushed for better mobile VR. As you might've noticed, though, AI is one of the big new trends in mobile this year is it any surprise that the ARM's pushing that angle with its latest batch of silicon?

The Cortex-A75 and Cortex-A55 have been designed with this concept in mind. Based on ARM's DynamIQ big.LITTLE technology, the first in line to use DynamIQ, each core is used as the "right processor for the right task," diverting commands and control depending on application and system tasks, thereby improving overall power usage and efficiency.

As each core can have different performance and power characteristics and the Cortex-A processors also contain dedicated processor instructions for machine learning and AI tasks ARM says it is possible for AI performance to increase by over 50 times during the next three to five years.

First up is the Cortex-A75 CPU core, which the company says can deliver laptop level performance without burning through any more power than existing mobile processors. ARM is promising a 50 percent boost in performance compared to the older A73 core, which should lend itself well to machine learning processes that run right on your devices. Remember: we're starting to see more smartphones optimize their performance on the fly based on behaviors sussed out by these kinds of algorithms. As these chipsets get more efficient at machine learning, we'll benefit more from the deep insights that get unearthed.

Meanwhile, ARM's A55 CPU is a little less interesting. It certainly seems like a capable update, though it's said to be 2.5 times as power efficient as the existing A53, a notable gain for a mid-range CPU. The thing to remember is that both of these processors use ARM's relatively new "DynamIQ"foundation, an updated design that allows for them to be used more flexibly.

See, ARM's older big.LITTLE architecture typically paired an equal number of high-powered CPU cores with less powerful ones use for tasks that aren't all that intense. DynamIQ, meanwhile, allows for up to eight completely different cores to be used you could team up one very powerful core with mixed bag of mid-range and low-power cores, depending on what the cluster is meant for.

And then there's the new Mali-G72 graphics core, an updated take on ARM's work with last year's G71. (You might remember it from devices like Huawei's pretty-damned-good Mate 9.) If you thought the A75 was big news for on-device AI, the G72 may be even more important.