A dead end or a new round in the mobile chipset market

The paradox of the gaming market: new chipsets are even more powerful, and games are becoming more primitive

Companies are always in

endless search for trends and development vectors. Over the past few years, gaming has become such an expensive yellow brick. However, there are a couple of "buts".

If we look at the results of 2021, we cannotice the obvious fact: all categories of games (computers, consoles, games in the browser) stagnate or sag, with the exception of mobile games designed for smartphones and tablets.

But all the nosebleed companies try to showhow cool, trendy and modern to play games. And analytics companies release reports that report a phenomenal number of gamers: 3 out of 4 Americans are gaming enthusiasts, Russia has 74 million gamers, and so on.

The funny thing about these statistics is thatthe vast majority of video game fans attached to the category sincerely do not even suspect that they are gamers. If we look at the statistics of the most popular mobile games, we will see Subway Surfers (endless runner), Ludo King, Candy Crush (balls in a row), Race Master 3D (racing).

All these games can be described ashyper-casual, that is, you can play them for a couple of minutes during a break at work or during a trip to the subway. Among the hyper-casual, in principle, can be attributed to the shooting games Call of Duty Mobile, Garena Free Fire and PUBG. A common feature of these games is often unpretentious graphics, the most simplified controls and purely nominal storytelling.

The simplification of hyper-casual games is due tothe desire to make the gameplay smooth even on the weakest hardware. Unfortunately, this concept directly contradicts the strategy of iron manufacturers, who are accustomed to using a narrative about productivity growth and phenomenal graphics realism.

Although, let's be honest, modern smartphones andTablets have overkill for which there is not even a real task, except for the rapid scrolling of the menu and games like "balls in a row." Apple is the most aware of this. But even in Cupertino, without having figured out what kind of opportunities iPhone could give, they simply stuck a mobile processor into a laptop.

In this regard, other iron manufacturersfound themselves in a quandary because Microsoft, although trying, has not yet offered a version of Windows that will give the user the same comfortable level of work as on familiar x86 processors.

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Arm Holding's new hardware

Let me remind you the concept of the mobile iron market.A company called Arm Holding designs new mobile processors and chipsets based on the ARM architecture. Every year the company holds a presentation where it shows new products. Companies such as Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung subsequently buy licenses for new designs, refine and release them under their own trademarks - Snapdragon, Exynos. By the way, Apple also buys licenses from Arm Holding, but the corporation prefers to develop designs on its own.

In its new presentation, Arm Holding focused on gaming, promising unprecedented graphics performance and even ray tracing, like on Nvidia cards.

Last year, Arm introduced the first chipsets forArmv9 architecture. Armv9 is an improvement on the Armv8 standard that has been with us since 2011. The improvements are related to increased security, artificial intelligence and image processing capabilities of the processor (important for photographs). However, the transition to the new architecture was not as smooth as we would like. So, the same Snapdragon Gen 1 chipset turned out to be too voracious and hot in complex tasks.

If you forgot, then modern top-end chipsetsare a set of cores: 1 super-performance core, 3 high-performance cores and 4 energy-efficient cores (the smartphone should use the latter for basic tasks).

Accordingly, the new design introduced by ArmHolding boasts a 20% improvement in energy efficiency across three high-performance Cortex-A715 cores. 4 energy-efficient Cortex-A510 cores have reduced energy consumption by 5%. About the most powerful Cortex-X3 core, they only said that peak performance increased by 25%.

The most interesting moment: Arm Holding, looking at Apple, egged on by the rest of the market, beats its hoof impatiently, trying to bring ARM processors into the computer and laptop segment.

So, in the performance slides, the company emphasizes that the new chipset is as much as 34% more powerful than the latest popular laptops.

The company also announced new designs.Let me remind you that we are used to the fact that the chipset has 8 cores, which were sold to us in different configurations: 4P (productive) + 4E (energy efficient), 2P + 6E, 1SP (super-productive) + 3P + 4E. Now Arm Holding offers chipsets with 12 cores, in which 8SP + 4P + 0E, which are designed for desktop computers and laptops (given the modest consumption of mobile chipsets, energy-efficient cores are not needed in laptops).

The graphic component, however, is also notremained unattended. And even more: the new GPU was called Immortalis, that is, “immortal” (from Latin). It sounds, of course, fun - Immortalis-G715, but certainly impressive. In total, three graphics were announced: the flagship Immortalis-G715, the mid-premium segment Mali-G715, and everyone else will get the Mali-G615 GPU.

Obviously, Arm Holding is not only aiming atsmartphones, but also imply some specialized game consoles. In principle, given the high energy efficiency and performance of Arm-chipsets, portable game consoles have a right to exist. A conditional SteamDeck on an Arm-chipset could work 2-4 times longer on a single charge.

So, in the new flagship graphics, a whole set of innovations.

Firstly, the graphics are now, in fact, completelycustomized. Arm Holding says the GPU can now have up to 16 cores. Throw in Apple's concept that boosts performance by simply sticking chipsets together (simplified M1 Max is 2 M1 Pro chipsets). So, if necessary, it will be possible to make chipsets with 32 graphics cores and more.

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Second, ray tracing.Again, it is logical that ray tracing is needed on large screens, and not on smartphones, where it is hardly possible to see the glare of light in a puddle. However, Arm Holding probably does not think so, indicating that the innovation will find application in AAA games on smartphones. If you also wondered what AAA games are on smartphones, then it turns out that here are: Genshin Impact, PUBG, Fortnite, Call of Duty and Honor of Kings.

However, of course, the demos look good. The differences will be visible even on a tiny screen. Below is a 14 second video:

Probably, new graphics capabilities will provoke new high-end games. Although who dares to do them is a big question. The industry needs a successful example of a AAA game that would collect the box office.

The third technology is Variable Rate Shading.Its essence lies in the fact that the graphics are primarily rendered where the action takes place and where the player is looking. Whereas the graphics around the edges of the screen can be more hazy and less detailed. To be honest, on the proposed screenshot, nothing really can be seen. Muddy here and there. Though Arm says FPS (frames per second) gains can be up to 40%.

Arm Holding has indicated that this technology willbe used on all new chipsets. In principle, everything is logical. Flagship and high-end chipsets don't need these tricks. They do a pretty good job of rendering the entire screen.

By the way, it is clear that Arm Holding decided to become a driver for the development of games. So, at the presentation, they separately emphasized that the company is working with game studios to achieve better performance.

Conclusion

If the rumors are to be believed, then in the second half of 2023 Qualcomm will show something in the laptop market that should compete with the M2 chipsets in MacBooks.

By the way, I'm most interested inthe potential for new ARM laptops to run Linux. With Valve launching Steamdeck on Linux, which does a pretty good job of playing games, it's just a matter of bringing in mammoths like Adobe. However, Adobe may have a different answer. The company is known to be actively developing web versions of Photoshop.

Implementation of new designs in the market according towith traditions will show us in December Qualcomm at the annual summit. Most likely, the first smartphone on the new chipset will be Xiaomi 13. The company liked to launch new products at the end of December. Well, in January or February, Samsung will please Samsung with its design option by introducing a new Galaxy S line. Although, if the rumors are true, Samsung may take a break by releasing a new generation of flagships based on Qualcomm chipsets.