ARM released a brand new CPU design Cortex A73 (aka Artemis), a small but most important upgrade over the current flagship A72 found in most flagship and upper mid-range smartphones and tablets.
The main key change is reduced size – the new design is physically 25% smaller than the one it replaces. This will allow chipset makers to create hexa-core(6 core) designs (2x A73 + 4x A53) which is the same size as an octa-core A53 processor.
This means you get a huge single-core performance at the same cost (the cost of silicon chips is proportional to their size). Basically, ARM sees chipsets like the Snapdragon 650 as the way forward for mid-range devices.
The Cortex-A73 is a basically flagships too. The major change will be sustained performance – while the old CPU can run at peak speed and throttles when it gets hot, the new one will stay at the same level of performance even under long workloads, this method already demonstrated in Apple A8 chip undergoing same performance almost to 10 to 15 min.
At the same nanometers and clock speed, the A73 offer a good 20% power savings while going 10% faster than the old CPU. But A73s built on the current process will likely be relegated to mid-rangers.
Instead, ARM sees things moving on to 10nm when the A73 will offer a 30% performance boost with 30% power use compared to an A72 built on 16nm. Cortex-A73 core can peak at 2.8GHz and stay under 750mW of power. This is due to the 10nm of the process node. We expected to see this Cortex A73 at end of 2016 or at beginning of 2017.
