ARM wants to get inside your laptop. For the first time, the company has published its product roadmap that covers the next two years and showcases what it expects to be year-over-year improvements of around 15 percent for its next processors. The roadmap also shows the company thinking it’s poised to win laptop market share, with a processor architecture designed for 5G always-on, always-connected devices.
“Over the last five years, advances in ARM technology have brought desktop-class PC performance into our smartphones, fundamentally changing how we use technology in our daily lives,” the company announced today. “This is a direct result of ARM’s annual cadence of introducing new world-class CPU designs, which have delivered double-digit gains every year in instructions-per-clock (IPC) performance since 2013.
“ARM is now applying this same design leadership, along with optimizing for the latest advances in process technology from our foundry partners, to enable the PC industry to overcome their reliance on Moore’s law — which has definitely slowed — and deliver a high-performance, always-on, always-connected laptop experience. It’s an experience that will be a necessity as 5G enables an entirely new world of connected possibilities.”
As part of the first time it’s shared a roadmap of any kind publicly, ARM says that the follow-up to its Cortex-A76 architecture will be codenamed Deimos and delivered to partners in 2018. It’s expected to deliver a more than 15 percent increase in compute performances.
After that, the company’s 2019 CPU codenamed Hercules will be available. It’s expected to improve power and area efficiency by 10 percent.
The company goes on to say in its announcement today that its roadmap of client CPUs has been designed to take advantage of the innovation 5G connectivity will bring. That, combined with innovations from silicon and foundry partners, is ARM hopes will enable it to break through the dominance of x86 and win “substantial market share” in Windows laptops and Chromebooks over the next five years.
In terms of Intel being nervous, Engadget points out that ARM’s Cortex-A76 is already competitive with Intel’s 2.6GHz Core i5-7300U, while the company thinks the Deimos and Hercules designs will outmatch it. “You would get ‘laptop-class’ speed from a more efficient mobile chip, in other words,” the publication writes.
“2018 was an important first step in expanding the ARM PC ecosystem and showing the world that we’re no longer bound to the idea that process technology will only incrementally improve every two years and that a laptop will need charging every few hours,” ARM says by way of concluding today’s announcement. “The pace of innovation that transformed smartphones into the compute platform of choice is now powering and transforming the larger screen devices.”
