ARM Confirms Existence of Next-gen Cortex-X "Blackhawk" Unit

[T0@st]

Last week Patrick Moorhead, CEO and founder of Moor Insights & Strategy, shared his insider sourced thoughts about ARM's next generation Cortex-X processor: "Blackhawk is planned to enable in smartphones shipping at the end of 2024. I think phones could be on the shelf a year from now at CES or maybe MWC." Moorhead believes that Cortex-X4's successor will be the most powerful option available at launch, which forms part of (ARM CEO) Rene Haas's strategy to "eliminate the performance gap between ARM-designed processors and custom ARM implementations." He believes that "this is a big and bold claim," since Apple is widely considered to rule the roost here with its cutting edge ARM-based Bionic designs. Moorhead's inside information has "Blackhawk" demonstrating the "largest year-over-year IPC performance increase in 5 years" citing undisclosed Geekbench 6 results.

He also presented evidence that the artificial intelligence processing is a key focus: "I am hopeful these performance goals translate to app performance as well. ARM also believes that Blackhawk will provide "great" LLM performance. I will assume that this has to do with big CPU IPC performance improvements as ARM says that its Cortex CPU is the #1 AI target for developers...The NPU and GPU can be an efficient way to run AI, but a CPU is the easiest and most pervasive way, which is why developers target it. A higher-performing CPU obviously helps here, but as the world moves increasingly to smaller language models, Arm's platform with higher-performing CPU and GPU combined with its tightly integrated ML libraries and frameworks will likely result in a more efficient experience on devices."




The Register contacted an ARM representative regarding Mr. Moorhead's claims about a next-gen Cortex-X's existence—a surprisingly forthcoming response was obtained: "I can confirm the information in the post from Patrick Moorhead is accurate. We will provide more details on Blackhawk when it launches later this year. No further comment at this time."

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[bonehead123]

But..

but....

but.......

Will it be able to run the "can it run Crysis" app on my shiny new $2-3000 phone, or better yet, turn that same new phone into an AI/ML monster that can map the human genome to the point that we can finally cure cancer once & for all ?

But seriously, hopefully this will result in some REAL performance gains, instead of the mediocre & minuscule 1-5% that we have been forced to accept every year over the past few decades....

 

[wolf]

I'm also interested in Adreno GPU development, the SD8 Gen 3 seems to be an emulation/android gaming powerhouse, if this new core is a really big leap it willgo hand in hand with boosting GPU performance where there is a CPU bottleneck, and hopfully the GPU sees +30% or more too. Chances are 2025 will be my next smartphone so this is fairly exciting to hear.

 

[Minus Infinity]

Why would my phone need to run LLM? Seriously?

 

[Dr. Dro]

Why would my phone need to run LLM? Seriously?

Because if it's not capable of trillions of tensor operations per second; it's a lame product and not marketable anymore - all so you can be spoonfed rhetoric created by generative AI. It's worthless, I asked Copilot today to write me an "unbiased biography of Joe Biden" (meaning, leave politics out of it) and it refused to do so, citing that "it's a controversial and influential person and it doesn't want to potentially offend me" - my brother in Christ we are talking about the President of the United States here. Kids will study him in school. Bleh.