ARM Cortex A76 aims at the laptop market

ARM released details about the Cortex A76, a new core design that aims at the laptop market. To be made on a 7nm process, the A76 core can hit clockspeeds above 3GHz and promises 35 percent better performance than the previous generation, while offering a 40 percent increase in energy efficiency.

According to ARM, the A76 core can perform within 10 percent of Intel's Skylake core within the same thermal constraints. Full details at HotHardware.

Arm claims laptop-class performance with the A76. While many may take this to mean something on the level of an Intel Atom core, Arm believes its A76 core can perform within 10-percent of a Skylake core with the same thermal constraints, but with approximately half the footprint. This has promising implications for the future of Arm-powered Windows notebooks provided the cost can be kept in line. There is also the issue of translating x86 instructions for legacy applications, but Microsoft already provides pretty good development tools for Arm-native compiling so common software can run natively.

At the same time, ARM also introduced the Mali-G76. The new graphics core is based on the same Bifrost architecture but promises 25 percent higher performance. It's now also capable of handling 8K video at 60fps.

The first devices based on the ARM Cortex-A76 are expected in 2019.