Arm pushes agentic AI and desktop-quality graphics in next-gen phone platform
New CPU and GPU designs chase lower latency and richer games within a 1 W power budget
Arm has unveiled its latest smartphone platform, Compute Subsystem for Mobile 2 (CSS-M), focusing on AI agents and desktop-quality graphics. This is part of Arm's strategy to shift AI workloads from the cloud to mobile devices and network edges. Director of Edge AI Chris Bergey stated, "All you can push to the edge, you will," highlighting the trend towards distributed AI processing.
The platform's C2 CPU cluster features a top-tier C2-Ultra core, delivering up to 15% higher single-thread performance than its predecessor. The cluster also includes six C2-Pro cores and two Scalable Matrix Extensions (SME2), offering up to a 70% speedup for small language models. Mali G2-Ultra NX, a dedicated AI-native Mali GPU, introduces neural acceleration, including Neural Super Sampling (NSS) and Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU).
These techniques allow rendering desktop-level graphics in a 1W power budget, rendering one-eighth of the pixels in the final sequence and reconstructing the rest. With CSS-M, Arm enables premium and pro variants of the Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU, allowing customers to balance performance and cost. Arm has also released its neural graphics SDK and sample code on GitHub, supporting the cross-platform Vulkan graphics API.
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