Chip design company ARM has unveiled its latest high performance processor design, the Cortex-A76. The company claims that the new design is 35 percent faster than the current Cortex-A75, making for performance that's comparable with Intel's Skylake i5 processors.
ARM licenses both chip designs and the instruction set that the chips use. Apple's smartphones and tablets use the ARM instruction set with custom, in-house designs from Cupertino. Most other smartphones and tablets, however, use processors that are either unmodified ARM designs (for example, Mediatek does this), or lightly customized ARM designs (such as Qualcomm's latest processors). Chips using the new design should hit the market in 2019.
The extra performance of the new design should help close the gap both with Apple's custom designs—in most situations, they're the fastest ARM chips on the market—and Intel's x86 processors. Speaking to CNET, ARM's lead processor architect Mike Filippo said that the new design would "do well" against Apple and roughly match the Intel Core i5-7300. That processor is a two-core, four-thread chip running at between 2.6 and 3.5 GHz using Intel's Kaby Lake architecture. With more cache, Filippo says that even i7 parts should be within reach.
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