Arm Unveils Cortex-X925 CPU and Immortalis G925 GPU, Targeting 2024 Flagship Devices

Arm has revised the naming convention for its Cortex-X CPU design to underscore what it claims is a significantly swifter CPU design.

Arm has announced its latest flagship CPU and GPU designs, the Cortex-X925 and Immortalis G925, respectively. These new designs are set to power the next generation of high-end mobile devices, promising significant performance and efficiency improvements over their predecessors.

The Cortex-X925 is Arm's most powerful CPU design to date, offering a 36 per cent increase in single-core performance compared to the X4 (as measured by Geekbench). It also features a 41 per cent improvement in AI workload performance time to token, with up to 3MB of private L2 cache.

This new CPU design will be paired with the next generation of Cortex-A microarchitectures, the Cortex-A725, which Arm claims offers a 35 per cent improvement in performance efficiency over the previous generation's A720 and a 15 per cent increase in power efficiency for the Cortex-A520.

Arm is also touting its Immortalis G925 GPU as its "most performant and efficient GPU" to date. It is claimed to be 37 per cent faster on graphic applications than the previous generation G720, with a 52 per cent boost in ray-tracing performance with complex objects and a 34 per cent improvement in AI and ML workloads — all while consuming 30 per cent less power.

The company will also provide "optimised layouts" of its new CPU and GPU designs, which it claims will simplify the process for device manufacturers to incorporate into its system on chip (SoC) layouts. Arm suggests that this new physical implementation solution will expedite the market launch of devices, potentially leading to broader adoption of devices featuring the Arm Cortex-X925 or Immortalis G925 compared to those with its previous generation designs.

Game developers will see Lumen ray tracing on Unreal Engine now supporting Immortalis. Whether this will sufficiently motivate more game developers to integrate ray tracing into their mobile games or how well those games would perform remains to be seen.

MediaTek Senior Vice President JC Hsu, Corporate Senior Vice President at MediaTek, was quoted in Arm's press release as saying: "MediaTek is dedicated to supporting the latest Armv9 Cortex-X925 CPU and Immortalis-G925 GPU Client solution in our next-generation flagship chipset, Dimensity 9400, later this year."

This suggests that we may see new Vivo or Oppo models by the end of 2024.

Not many phones use Arm's Cortex and Immortalis designs in tandem. MediaTek's Dimensity 9200 chip, which powered the Vivo X90, X90 Pro, and Oppo Find X6, was the first to employ Arm's premier hardware-based ray-tracing GPU design, the Immortalis G715, alongside the Cortex-X4. However, it is more usual to see the Cortex paired with a different GPU design in a mobile chip, such as Samsung's Exynos 2400, found in Samsung's Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus.