The rapid uptake and advancement of new and exciting use cases in the smartphone market means previous generation devices eventually won’t be able to run the advanced software workloads and immersive use-cases that are becoming increasingly common, and this mobile innovation is now driving the smartphone refresh cycle.
We’ve talked before about the huge rise in both the uptake and revenue generation of High Fidelity Mobile Gaming, and this trend is more than delivering on our predictions. In China especially, mobile is the fastest growing and most popular gaming platform, outstripping console and PC and boasting the highest proportion of female gamers too. This in turn means we’re also prepared to spend more on mobile gaming than we’ve seen in the past, with Forbes reporting that the super popular Fortnite, created by Epic Games, is raking in a massive US$1 million per day. Perhaps even more telling is that our immersion in the gameplay world is eclipsing even our search for love, as playtime of Fortnite reportedly outstrips the time spent on popular matchmaking apps. This means that the early mobile gaming usage patterns – a few minutes here and there on the bus or waiting for a meeting – are no more. Now, users expect to be able to sustain high performance for much longer as they enter into immersive, connected battles with adversaries across the globe.
Efficiency, then, is still just as vital in the premium market as it is in the Mainstream tier, less because of cost implications but more so in terms of the level of experience and usage the consumer expects from their high-end device. This means the CPUs in our next generation products will have to provide more single threaded performance than ever before. This is even more important as we start to hear rumours about high-performance UIs, meaning stylus-controlled devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note series can provide sufficient responsiveness to simulate a real-time writing experience.
With the emergence of technologies such as Google ARCore, no next-gen mobile device manufacturer would dream of launching a flagship product without the ability to support a stellar AR experience, even if we’re still barely scratching the surface of the applications this can enable. Currently, AR is still sufficiently demanding to mean that even premium devices can run pretty hot, so for it to reach its true potential in the thermal bounds of the mobile device means even more emphasis on efficiency.
One of the other important things that’s happened in the premium mobile space is the emergence of a new target for developers in the form of Android NN, under which sit the CPU and GPU, and through which developers can target the amazing ML compute performance of the next generation processors and technologies that come under Arm’s Project Trillium. It will be truly exciting to see how the cleverest developers can exploit this compute power, as well as the growing ability to shift it to the edge. This on-device ML means that even if you’re underground on a WiFi-less subway, or in a Chinese taxi cab limited by internet restrictions, you can still use Google translate, image recognition and more, without the need to connect to the cloud.
We can expect to see some really compelling and exciting products delivering more performance at fantastic levels of efficiency, with performance per watt better than ever, and as always, Arm’s IP aims to be at the cutting edge, enabling our partners to deliver the very latest experience straight into the hands of the consumer.