• Cortex‑A720, Arm’s new big core, replaces A715 for next‑gen mobile and edge devices. • Offers up to 20% power efficiency improvement over the previous A715 core. • Supports Armv9.2 ISA with 32/64 KiB L1 caches and 128‑512 KiB private L2. • Front‑end improvements cut mispredict penalty by one cycle, boosting real‑world performance. • Branch prediction now handles two unconditional branches per cycle, enhancing instruction throughput. • Designed for DSU configurations, it pairs with Cortex‑A500 series little cores for balanced performance.

Article Summaries:

  • Arm has unveiled its latest big‑core design, the Cortex‑A720, set to replace the Cortex‑A715. Codenamed “Hunter,” the new core follows Arm’s yearly cadence of incremental performance and energy‑efficiency gains, touting up to a 20 % improvement in power efficiency. It supports Armv9.2, offers 32/64 KiB L1 caches and 128‑512 KiB private L2, and is intended as the big core in typical DSU configurations, often paired with Cortex‑A500‑series little cores. Key refinements include a one‑cycle reduction in mispredict penalty, enhanced two‑taken branch prediction, pipelined FDIV/FSQRT units, and lower L2 hit latency (9 cycles). A new spatial‑prefetch engine and dual area‑optimized/full configurations round out the release.

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