FASTER? PLEASE! Arm aims to make your Android phone faster with next-gen mobile chips.

How will Arm’s in-house designs compete with Apple’s? “I expect we’ll do well against Apple,” said Mike Filippo, Arm’s lead processor architect.

But he was clear which company Arm considers its primary rival. “Our real competition is Intel,” he said.

“We’re building for sustained performance,” Filippo said. “The A76 is the biggest leap we’ve taken in our annual roadmap since we started in 2014.”

The 35 percent speed boost is a minimum, Filippo said. Some mathematical tasks will get a boost of 50 percent to 70 percent, and high-performance software that needs fast memory access should get a 60 percent to 95 percent boost for fetching that data, he added. Performance improvements vary depending on which speed test is used, he cautioned, adding that Arm used SPECint for its measurement of a 35 percent performance boost.

The Cortex-A76 has about the performance of today’s Intel Core i5-7300, Filippo said. Configured with more cache memory, it should compete with an i7 chip, he said.

Intel failed to recognize the importance of the mobile market until it was too late, and soon the mobile chipmakers are going to start moving in on Intel’s traditional turf.