Arm has outlined its product roadmap at the latest Arm Summit. The company previewed its next two client CPUs, codenamed Matterhorn and Makalu, and said it will offer only 64-bit cores from 2022.
The Matterhorn generation will come in 2021, as the successor to this year's Cortex-A78, followed by the Makalu in 2022. These will provide a 30 percent performance increase from the current Cortex-A78 to the future Makalu generations. This follows already a 2.5-fold increase in performance since the Cortex-A72 in 2015.
The new products build on the company's 'Total Compute' strategy announced a year ago. This is based around three key principles: increasing compute performance of the system, better developer access to that performance through Arm software and tools, and security protection throughout the ecosystem.
On the latter front, Arm will be introducing from the Matterhorn generation CPUs a new security feature called Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) to tighten security vulnerabilities that can occur in memory subsystems. MTE will make detecting memory safety violations easier and more efficient for every software developer, the company said.
In addition, Arm confirmed plans to shift to 64-bit processors, in line with expectations that most smartphones will use this architecture by 2023. To help developers save time and avoid working on both 32- and 64-bit systems, the company said all future Cortex-A "big" cores will only support 64-bit code from its 2022 product releases.
