The ARM C2-Ultra cores will reach 4.45 GHz and will have a dual SME2 engine for AI tasks

Along with the rest of the new features of the CSS for Mobile 2 platform, ARM has unveiled its new range of C2 CPU cores to replace the previous C1 cores on the Lumex platform.

The most powerful nuclei will be the ARM C2-Ultra oriented towards heavy tasks where, according to the company, it will offer up to 15% more performance in a core than the last generation.

Of those 15%, the real improvement in IPC and architecture remains at 7%, while the remaining 8% is achieved by increasing the clock frequencies, going from 4.10 GHz of the last generation to a maximum of 4.45 GHz in these new C2-Ultra.

Dual SME2 engine and cache improvements for agentic AI tasks

For local artificial intelligence acceleration, ARM has preferred not to integrate its own NPU and focus on the CPU itself. To do this, they continue with the strategy they started last year with their SME2 engines. In this new generation we find two SME2 acceleration motors running at 3.0 GHZ, double those we had in the previous platform. Of course, these are the same SME2 motors from the previous C1 architecture, so the power gain at this point is due to that extra motor which also operates at higher frequencies.

Support for LUTi (Lookup Tables) instructions is also added, designed to accelerate light AI processing in INT4 and 2-bit formats without having to access the system RAM.

According to the company’s data, these improvements will offer 40% extra performance in tasks such as speech-to-text transcription, or 41% lower latency. The initial response of AI models will also be 25% faster.

The L2 cache memory is also expanded to 3 MB per core. All this with some efficiency improvements that promise 38% less consumption with equal performance.