Arm-based Windows laptops may get the battery capabilities users have always wanted.
If all goes well for the British company behind the Arm architecture, the new chips could achieve the same success in computers as they have in smartphones.
Arm announced its new Cortex-A76 CPUs, Mali-G76 GPUs, and Mali-76 VPUs, designed to power the next generation of computers, called Always Connected PCs, running Windows 10 on Arm.
The Cortex-A76 processor is based on Arm’s DynamIQ technology and offers 35% higher performance and 40% improved power efficiency over the Cortex-A75 released last year. In addition, it offers approximately 4x the gain in compute performance to better handle AI and machine learning.
Arm has also made significant improvements in the graphics department. The company says that the new Mali-G76 GPU can offer about a 30% improvement in performance and power efficiency. When handling machine learning tasks, it is about 2.7 times better than the Mali-G72.
Additionally, the new Mali-V76 video processor can decode and play 8K UHD movies at 60fps. That means you can watch four games in 4K or record an entire conference call. Drop the resolution to 1080p and you can enjoy up to 16 simultaneous streams.
If in the coming years, the company manages to achieve a level of performance that can compete with what Intel and AMD, it could change the balance in the Windows PC market as well as the flagship smartphone market.
Arm could become the new king of processors, as it's not just Microsoft that's backing it. Apple is also rumored to be working on a device called Project Star, which could be an Arm-based MacBook with a touchscreen.
It would be great if we could have devices that wouldn't need charging as often, but were powerful enough to run demanding applications.
