ARM wants to focus on performance for CPUs in 2025

During CES 2025, Chris Bergey, senior vice president and general manager of Arm’s customer business line, gives an interview to PCWorld. Bergey stated that ARM’s goals for 2025 are speed up Arm cores and accelerate AI workloads.

The executive states that ARM is leading in “IPC in some of the products on the market”, “but we are registering at a lower frequency than some of these products”. And he summarizes that the first objective consists of “IPC times frequency” that “gets you to performance [maior]”.

To fulfill the second objective, ARM needs to add specific instruction capabilities to its CPUs and GPUs.

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Bergey comments that “On a phone, you can render at 1080p, 60Hz, or render at 540p, 30Hz, and use AI to interpolate”. This method is more energy efficient than rendering the image directly.

From what he said, it seems that the rumor from August last year that ARM would be creating GPUs for home PCs and AIs is confirmed.

The senior vice president is responsible for both the smartphone and laptop and tablet markets, where Arm’s designs are licensed to companies like Qualcomm and Apple, who tweak them and ultimately manufacture them as finished products.

Currently, the company works with two licenses:

• Core License: In which the customer purchases a verified core that includes an Arm Cortex CPU, Mali GPU, or other intellectual property.
• Architectural License: whereby companies like Apple can design their own cores from scratch, as long as they are fully compatible with the Arm architecture.

Energy Efficiency and Performance

Arm’s RISC architecture is generally considered more power efficient than the X86 architecture used by AMD and Intel. However, it requires applications to be coded natively for it or for an emulator, such as Microsoft’s Prism, to interpret the code for an X86 chip to understand.

While Arm chips are often more efficient, they can still lag behind in overall performance. One notable exception is Apple’s custom M4 chip, known for its competitive single-thread performance..

Arm is also looking to facilitate technology integration to maximize performance. “If it needs to reach a frequency of four gigahertz, we will provide the recipe for that,” Bergey said.

Today, the company is amid a lawsuit against Qualcomm that has continued since 2022. Last October, the lawsuit escalated after Arm canceled the architectural licensing agreement.

However, a jury ruled in favor of Qualcomm on two of the three main issues, leaving one issue still unresolved. And Arm decided to continue the process.

Font: PCWorld.