Roadmap: Upcoming ARM socs for laptops should surpass U version Core i5

ARM takes a look at its roadmap for laptops CPUs and claims performance will increase by more than 15 percent annually. The upcoming Deimos and Hercules socs should perform better than Intel’s Core i5, can be concluded from the roadmap.

The client compute cpu roadmap, which contains the laptop chips, is the first roadmap it shares publicly, according to ARM. The company is looking ahead to 2020. Next year, the Deimos soc should appear, a 7nm chip based on DynamIQ, the successor of big.Little, which allows configurations of multiple processor cores in socs. Deimos provides a performance improvement of 15 percent or more, according to ARM, compared to the Cortex-A76 that the company announced this year. As early as this year, ARM will start shipping Deimos to its partners, so they are expected to integrate the SOC into next year’s laptop models.

The successor to Deimos has been codenamed Hercules and this generation is due to appear in 2020, with partners having it available next year. This chip is optimized for both 7nm and 5nm production processes. Hercules should deliver a ten percent improvement in surface area and consumption, in addition to performance improvements, which, according to the roadmap, will be less than 15 percent.

In any case, in combination with the switch to 5nm, ARM expects the performance of Hercules to be 2.5 times higher than that of the ARM laptop chips based on the Cortex-A73 from 2016. compared to Intel Core i5 in the U series, judging by the charts the company publishes.

According to ARM, a Cortex-A76 computing core already performs equivalent to a Core i5-7300U core, with lower consumption. That claim is based on results of the single-threaded SPECint2006 Speed ​​benchmark, run on Linux. How the performance in real world benchmarks will fall is still unknown.

ARM, in its own words, is determined, along with its partners, to “break the dominance of x86 and gain substantial market share with Windows laptops and Chromebooks over the next five years.” Among other things, the longer battery life and the arrival of 5g should help the manufacturer with this. Qualcomm is already working with Microsoft on laptops with arm chips and LTE connectivity. So far, these don’t seem very successful.