Arm’s 2025 CPU plans include a big push in PC performance

You would think that Arm, which arguably has been the vanguard in the smartphone and PC industry push for improved power efficiency, would double down on that strategy in its plans for 2025. Actually, it’s sort of the opposite.

PCWorld sat down at CES 2025 with Chris Bergey, senior vice president and general manager for Arm’s client line of business. Bergey is responsible for both the smartphone as well as the laptop and tablet business, where Arm’s designs are licensed by companies like Qualcomm and Apple, who tweak and eventually manufacture them as finished goods.

Arm provides multiple types of licenses, but the two most common types are a core license, where a customer will buy a verified core that includes an Arm Cortex CPU, Mali GPU, or other intellectual property. Arm also sells architectural licenses to companies like Apple, which gives them the freedom to design their own cores from scratch, though they must be fully compatible with the Arm architecture.

Arm’s RISC architecture is generally considered to be more power-efficient than the X86 architecture used by AMD and Intel, though it requires either that applications be natively coded for it or for an emulator like Microsoft’s Prism to step in and interpret the code for an X86 chip to understand. While the Arm chips are often more efficient — in terms of the work done per clock cycle (instructions per clock, or IPC) or per watt — they still can lag in overall performance. One exception has been Apple’s custom M4 chip, where its single-threaded performance is seen as especially competitive.

In 2025, the plan is to improve Arm’s own cores, Bergey said. And the first goal is simply to run them faster.

“We think that we are reaching, we’ve reached kind of IPC leadership, and now people are getting very aggressive on frequency, so we’re going to continue to really push there,” Bergey said.

“We’re leading on IPC on some of the products in the market,” Bergey said. “But we’re clocking at a lower frequency than some of those products. And so what I’m just suggesting is — you know, IPC times frequency, right, gets you to [higher] performance. We want to continue to provide the highest performance Arm cores, so we’ll continue to make those investments.”

Bergey said that Arm’s second priority is to accelerate AI workloads on its own designs, specifically on the CPU and GPU. On the CPU, that entails specific instruction capabilities that Arm is adding to the CPUs, progressing past Neon, its Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE), and 2021’s SVE2. These additional extensions will build off of SVE2 to accelerate some of these AI workloads, Bergey said.

Arm also plans to make additional investments in its GPU business — and, like its more established competitors in the PC space, to use AI to improve graphics. “In a mobile handset, you can render at 1080p, 60Hz right? But you could also render at 540p, 30Hz, and use AI to interpolate.”

That sort of approach should be very familiar to PC users who have bought graphics cards from AMD or Nvidia, and who will end up using technologies like DLSS 4’s neural rendering to ease the burden on a discrete GPU. In Arm’s case, using AI to interpolate or render an image is simply more power-efficient than directly rendering the image, Bergey said.

“We’re going to be a leader in trying to bring total processing to the GPUs in a mobile environment,” Bergey said.

Expect to see that as part of what Arm calls the Arm CSS for Client, its next-gen Arm compute platform.

“Basically, we’re making it easier for people to put the technology together, and do so to maximize the performance,” Bergey said. “So if you need to maximize that frequency and get to a four-gigahertz design, we’re going to be able to provide you that recipe for some of the latest [manufacturing] nodes.”

Arm’s litigation: It ain’t over ’til it’s over

Arm normally enjoys solid relationships with its licensing partners — save for Qualcomm, and an ongoing lawsuit that has simmered since 2022. Last October, that suit boiled over after Arm cancelled Qualcomm’s architectural licensing agreement. But when the suit reached court, a district judge found in favor of Qualcomm in two of the three issues, including that Qualcomm proved that the CPUs acquired via Nuvia are covered by its architectural license, and that Qualcomm did not breach the terms of the Nuvia license it acquired.

However, the jury could not come to a conclusion over whether Nuvia itself had breached the terms of its architectural license. According to Bergey, this leaves the case between the two companies “unresolved.” “It’s still an open issue that needs to be resolved between the two parties,” he said. He declined to comment further.

Qualcomm, for its part, was undeterred. “We’ve made a public statement that we are happy with the outcome of the case, and [the court] upheld that we have the right to innovate and to the technology that we are bringing, the disruption that we are creating in the marketplace,” said Nitin Kumar, senior director of product management, at CES last week.