Arm-based PC processors are highly energy efficient, but are inferior to competitors in heavy workloads. Arm senior vice president Chris Bergey told PC World at CES 2025 about the company’s plans to significantly increase the clock speeds of its processor cores to improve performance. He also said that the licensing claim against Qualcomm is “still an open issue that needs to be resolved.”
Image source: Arm
The two most common types of Arm licenses are core and architecture. In the first case, the customer purchases the right to manufacture an already developed product, such as a Cortex CPU or Mali GPU. In the second case, the license gives the freedom to develop your own kernels from scratch, only while maintaining compatibility with the Arm architecture.
The Arm RISC architecture is generally considered to be more power efficient than the x86 architecture used by AMD and Intel, although it requires either building native programs or using an emulator to run x86 applications. While Arm chips are often more efficient—in terms of work done per clock (instructions per clock, IPC) or per watt—they can still lag in overall performance. The exception was the custom Apple M4 chip, which demonstrated very competitive single-threaded performance.
«We are the IPC leader in some products in the market,” Bergey said. “But we operate at a lower frequency than some of these products.” And so I’m just suggesting – you know, IPC times frequency, right, gives you [higher] performance. We want to continue to deliver the highest performance Arm cores, so we will continue to make these investments.”
Arm’s second priority is accelerating AI workloads on its own designs, particularly on CPUs and GPUs. In future processors, Arm plans to add new scalable vector extensions. In GPUs, Arm will use AI to improve graphics. “On mobile you can render at 1080p, 60Hz, right? But you can also render at 540p, 30Hz and use AI for interpolation,” Bergey said. He argues that using AI to interpolate or render an image is more energy efficient than directly rendering the image.
According to Bergey, Arm is going to be a leader in efforts to move full processing to GPUs in the mobile environment. This will be part of Arm CSS for Client, Arm’s next generation computing platform. “Essentially, we’re making it easier for people to put technology together and do it to maximize productivity,” Bergey said. “So if you need to maximize that frequency and get a four-gigahertz design, we can give you that recipe for some of the latest [production] nodes.”
Arm has traditionally maintained stable relationships with its licensing partners. The exception was the ongoing litigation with Qualcomm since 2022. Last October, Arm attempted to cancel its architectural licensing agreement with Qualcomm. But the court ruled in favor of Qualcomm on two out of three issues. According to the court, Qualcomm did not violate Arm’s license by gaining access to the processor architecture of the Nuvia company it absorbed.
However, the jury could not reach a conclusion about whether Nuvia itself violated the terms of its architectural license. That leaves the matter between the two companies “unresolved,” Bergey said. “This is still an open issue that needs to be resolved between the two sides,” he said, declining to comment further.