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Arm’s May 25, 2021 announcement introduced three licensable Armv9 CPU designs—Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510—and a broader Mali GPU range for chipmakers to combine in their own systems-on-chip (SoCs). The cores serve different roles: peak performance, sustained work and efficiency. They are processor designs, not finished chips or phones, and Arm’s performance figures are vendor claims tied to specific comparison baselines.
What Arm announced—and what it did not
Arm presented the CPU and GPU designs as part of its Total Compute portfolio, which also included system IP such as the DynamIQ Shared Unit 110 (DSU-110). Chipmakers license and integrate this IP into SoCs; phone makers then build devices around those chips. The announcement therefore described building blocks and reference configurations, not retail phone specifications.
DSU-110 supports configurable CPU clusters. Arm said it could support up to eight Cortex-X2 CPUs, although the smartphone examples Arm highlighted used a mix of X-, A7- and A5-series cores rather than eight X2s. The intended point was flexibility: different core types could share work according to performance and power needs.
Arm also said in 2021 that mobile big and little cores would be 64-bit only by 2023. That was the company’s stated ecosystem direction at the time, not a claim that every device or software environment changed on a single date.
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How the three Cortex cores differ
| Core | Intended role | Arm’s published comparison |
|---|---|---|
| Cortex-X2 | Highest peak and burst performance, especially for demanding single-threaded work. | Arm claimed a 30% performance improvement over “today’s flagship Android smartphones” in its 2021 launch announcement. Its technical explanation frames this as a peak single-threaded comparison with Cortex-X1-based flagship Android devices shipping by May 2021. |
| Cortex-A710 | Sustained multiprocessor performance within a phone’s thermal limits. | Arm reported 10% higher performance at the same power envelope as Cortex-A78, and 30% better power efficiency. |
| Cortex-A510 | Efficient handling of lighter or background workloads. | Arm reported 35% higher performance than Cortex-A55 and more than 3× ML performance; its technical article describes matrix-multiply throughput as the basis for the ML comparison. |
These percentages are Arm’s claims, not guarantees for every device. The X2 result depends on a specified configuration and comparison baseline; Arm notes that product results vary with implementation, software, compiler and thermals. A retail phone’s performance also depends on its SoC design and cooling, among other factors. See Arm’s launch announcement and technical CPU article for the stated claims and qualifications.
What the labels mean in practice
The X2, A710 and A510 are complementary workload roles, not three equivalent alternatives. In a mixed cluster, a demanding interactive task can use a high-performance core, sustained parallel work can use A710 cores, and lighter work can be assigned to efficiency-focused A510 cores. Actual scheduling is determined by the SoC, operating system and implementation.
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Which Mali GPU fits each announced tier?
| GPU | Arm’s stated positioning | Published claim |
|---|---|---|
| Mali-G710 | High-performance graphics for premium smartphones and Chromebooks. | Arm reported 20% gains for compute-intensive experiences and a 35% uplift for machine-learning tasks. |
| Mali-G610 | A lower-price-point option inheriting G710 features. | No comparable percentage is stated in the launch material summarized here. |
| Mali-G510 | Midrange phones, premium TVs and set-top boxes. | No comparable percentage is stated in the launch material summarized here. |
| Mali-G310 | Entry-level devices. | No comparable percentage is stated in the launch material summarized here. |
The GPU names mark Arm’s product range and intended market positioning; they do not dictate which GPU a particular phone must use. The G710 figures are vendor claims, not independent tests of a shipping handset. Arm’s announcement describes the Mali GPU range and its claims.
Arm’s example phone configurations
| Reference design | CPU arrangement | GPU | Design emphasis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premium | 1 Cortex-X2 + 3 Cortex-A710 + 4 Cortex-A510 | Mali-G710 | Peak performance alongside sustained and efficient cores. |
| Mainstream | 4 Cortex-A710 + 4 Cortex-A510 | Mali-G510 | Sustained performance and cost/performance targets without an X2 core. |
These were Arm reference configurations, not universal recipes for phone makers. Arm’s smartphone Total Compute design article explains the premium and mainstream examples.
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- MEMORIES MADE PICTURE PERFECT: Capture every angle in stunning clarity, from wide family photos to close-ups of friends, with the triple-lens camera on Galaxy A17 5G.
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Dimensity 9000: a later silicon example
Arm identified MediaTek Dimensity 9000 as the first announced silicon implementation of the Total Compute design. Arm described it as using one Cortex-X2, three Cortex-A710s and four Cortex-A510s, plus a 10-core Mali-G710 GPU, on TSMC’s 4 nm process. This is an SoC example, not identification of a specific retail phone model; the announcement alone does not establish which handset to buy or its current availability. See Arm’s Dimensity 9000 announcement.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to interpret the announcement when comparing phones
The Arm designs help explain the roles a chipmaker can assign to CPU and GPU IP, but they cannot rank finished phones by themselves. The X2 headline figure, for example, is not a direct benchmark result for every phone using an X2-based SoC. For a device comparison, use measurements of the actual handsets and consider cooling, battery behavior, software support and price alongside the chip configuration.
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Arm’s Cortex-A710 documentation lists Armv9-A, SVE2 and Memory Tagging Extension among the core’s features; these are architectural capabilities, not standalone measures of phone speed. The current product documentation is available on Arm’s Cortex-A710 product page.
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