Arm debuted its new CSS for Mobile 2 technology for chipmakers to include on future silicon powering smartphones. The primary upgrade is around the GPU, which has been redesigned to allow AI to upscale graphics and improve the framerate for a better mobile gaming experience on premium Android phones coming next year. Arm has also improved its CPU clusters for AI agent processing.
Every smartphone needs a CPU and GPU, but more processing power is needed at the top end of the phone market. Phones using MediaTek chips often have Arm CPU cores and GPUs, with last year’s Oppo Find X9 Pro packing a MediaTek Dimensity 9500 chip that uses a Mali G1-Ultra GPU to render graphics.
Now, Arm is announcing the Mali G2-Ultra NX, which the company says is its first AI-native GPU, using AI to improve rendered visuals directly in the graphics pipeline, lowering latency and improving power efficiency. Typically, graphics data is ported to and from other AI-dedicated areas, such as the neural processing unit, to enable AI acceleration, but integrating this directly into the GPU reduces travel time and energy used.
The Mali G2-Ultra uses a trio of AI methods to perform this. Neural super sampling turns low-resolution renders into higher-resolution images with Arm, suggesting a jump from 540p to 1080p, while neural frame rate upscaling generates frames between rendered ones — for example, to jump from 30 frames per second to 60. Neural super sampling and denoising takes the former technology and scrubs out “noise” (dot artifacts in an image) for graphically demanding scenes like ray-traced reflections and complex lighting.
By having the phone render graphics in lower resolution and fewer frames that can be boosted with AI, smartphones can be made smaller and potentially cheaper, said Chris Bergey, executive vice president of Arm’s Edge AI Business unit.
“If we can provide an amazing 540p, 30 frames per second experience, and it allows you to use a smaller battery, that allows for a smaller form factor and potentially allows for a lower-cost handheld,” Bergey said.
During a briefing ahead of the announcement, Arm showed off a game it co-developed with Sumo Digital to showcase those AI methods. Amid scenes of a fantasy character descending into a cave system illuminated by neon-bright giant mushrooms, Arm explained that the game was a proof of concept for how developers could use the AI methods to deliver 4x higher performance efficiency and up to 70% lower external memory traffic (e.g. data transferring out from and back to the GPU) compared with conventional graphics rendering.
All these improvements lead to a 24% improvement in benchmark performance along with a 14% improvement in ray tracing.
CPU core upgrades for AI agent tasks
Arm announced new C2 CPU cores designed for AI agent workflows on devices. Compared to last year’s C1 cores, the new C2 cores have up to 15% higher single-thread and 12% higher multi-thread performance and 1.7x performance across AI models while using 38% less power. They also launch apps and browse the web faster.
Higher single-thread performance reduces latency, while multi-thread performance helps multiple tasks progress concurrently, Arm explained in a press release. Across a sample agentic workflow combining several tasks — speech processing, memory retrieval, reasoning, application execution and web browsing — C2-ultra cores completed the workflow 24% faster than last year’s cores.
Each chipmaker decides the type and number of cores to include in their system-on-chip, balancing performance, efficiency and cost. The aforementioned MediaTek Dimensity 9500, released last year, has an eight-core CPU: one C1-Ultra, three C1-Premium and four C1-Pro.
David Lumb
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