Arm Launches Next-Gen Big-Core: Cortex-A725

As part of today’s new 2024 Compute Subsystem (CSS) launch, Arm is unveiling its newest high-performance big core – the Cotex-A725, formerly codename Chaberton.

The new Cortex-A725 is the successor to the Cortex-A720 which was launched last year. It is part of the 2024 Client Compute Subsystem (2024 CSS) which comprises the DSU-120, the interconnect subsystem, and the Immortalis GPU. The Arm compute power is housed in the DSU-120. This includes the Cortex-A520, and the new Cortex-A725, and the Cortex-X925 itself. All three are second-generation Armv9.2 CPUs. Armv9.1 brought GEMM and BFloat16 support while Armv9.2 brought SME (SVE2) support.

Details of the new Cortex-A725 were rather lackluster this year. Overall, the company says it has widened many of the back-end buffers. The new A725 offers a new 1 MiB L2 configuration, effectively doubling the capacity over its predecessor. All-in-all, Arm says the new A725 is the widest and deepest big core designed to date.

A large part of the effort around the new A725 revolved around the 3-nanometers process node. Beyond special optimizations specifically for the process, Arm says that various architectural changes took place to offer better PPA. One of those changes were noted on the first bullet point above which dealt with register file structure enhancement. Here Arm says that various lower-level optimizations were done to the memory buffers specifically for the 3-nm process. For example, the new 1 MiB L2 capacity option is delivered at ISO-area compared to the A720, which is beyond the area improvement offered by the process technology alone.

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