Arm announces its next-generation CPU and GPU designs for flagship smartphones: the Cortex-X925 CPU and Immortalis G925 GPU, likely in smartphones in late 2024
On Wednesday, IP core designer Arm announced its next-generation CPU and GPU designs for flagship smartphones: the Cortex-X925 CPU and Immortalis G925 GPU.
Context & Ripple Effects
Arm has repeatedly refreshed the CPU and graphics building blocks that feed premium mobile chips, from the Cortex-A78 and Mali-G78 generation to Armv9 CPUs and Immortalis graphics with hardware ray tracing. The X925 and G925 continue that design-IP cadence for the next flagship-phone cycle.
The pairing matters because Arm is updating both general-purpose and graphics compute rather than positioning a standalone accelerator; it extends the company’s role in the core performance envelope available to phone-chip designers.
First-order effects
- Chip designers licensing Arm IP can begin integrating the Cortex-X925 CPU and Immortalis G925 GPU into forthcoming flagship smartphone system-on-chips.
- Phone makers planning late-2024 premium devices gain a new Arm CPU/GPU baseline to evaluate against the prior Immortalis generation.
Second-order effects
- Competing mobile-chip vendors will face pressure to show comparable CPU and graphics gains in their own flagship platforms, particularly where GPU capabilities differentiate premium devices.
- The release reinforces the importance of CPU-and-GPU integration in handset performance decisions, alongside the specialized AI-compute approaches covered by Arm’s earlier machine-learning-focused mobile design.
Third-order effects
- If Arm’s annual-style IP refreshes continue to reach flagship products quickly, premium smartphone differentiation will increasingly depend on how licensees implement and tune common Arm building blocks rather than on CPU instruction-set choice alone.
- The broader market may continue toward heterogeneous mobile compute, with CPU, GPU and dedicated accelerators sharing workloads; the balance will vary by chip vendor and software support.
The trend: This is another step in the shift toward heterogeneous compute as the defining architecture of flagship mobile chips.