ARM’s Lumex platform leverages next-gen CPU, GPU and software for big AI performance and efficiency gains

Most modern flagship phones, tablets, and laptops with ARM-based processors have neural processing units (NPUs) that enable hardware-accelerated AI features. But most of those NPUs are designed by chip makers rather than ARM itself.

While ARM has announced plans to add neural accelerators to upcoming GPUs, the company's next play for the consumer AI space is the ARM Lumex compute subsystem (CSS) platform, which leverages the company's next-gen CPU, GPU, and software to bring significant improvements in AI performance without the need to offload everything to an NPU.

At launch, the platform consists of a new ARMv9.3 CPU with C1 series CPU cores featuring Scalable Matrix Extension version 2 (SME2) plus the new Mali G1-Ultra GPU.

ARM says that those components interact with the company's latest software stack to deliver:

Up to 5x performance boost in AI

Up to 4.7x lower latency for speech-based workloads

Up to 2.8x faster audio generation

Up to 3x better efficiency for AI tasks

While the company is pushing the AI capabilities of its new platform, there are also some improvements for other tasks as well.

For example, the new G1-Ultra GPU, meanwhile, is said to bring 20% better performance in graphics benchmarks, twice the ray-tracing performance, and use 9 percent less energy per frame generated when compared with the previous-gen Immortalis-G925 GPU.

And the C1-Ultra processor for flagship-class devices is said to deliver up to a 25% boost in performance over the previous-gen Corex-X925 CPU cores, while also improving efficiency by up to 12 percent.

ARM is actually introducing four different C1 CPU cores though:

C1-Ultra (flagship): 25% single-threaded performance boost over previous-gen

C1-Premium (sub-flagship): 35% smaller area than C-1 Ultra

C1-Pro: High-end efficiency core with 16% better sustained performance than previous-gen

C1-Nano: Low-power efficiency core with 26% efficiency improvement

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