Arm has unveiled its Compute Subsystem (CSS) for Mobile 2, a next-generation smartphone chip platform designed around running AI agents locally and delivering desktop-quality gaming graphics, all within a device's tight power budget. Announced at the Arm Everywhere China event in Shanghai, the platform succeeds last year's Lumex CSS and underlines Arm's push to position AI processing at the "edge" on devices rather than solely in the cloud, which it argues reduces latency, connectivity dependence and scaling costs as AI shifts from passive features towards autonomous "agentic" assistants that plan and execute multi-step tasks.

The new C2 CPU cluster is led by a C2-Ultra core offering up to 15 percent higher single-thread performance than its predecessor, alongside a flagship configuration pairing two C2-Ultra cores with six efficiency-focused C2-Pro cores and two SME2 matrix-processing units, double last year's count, which Arm says can speed up small language models by up to 70 percent. On the graphics side, the new Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU introduces dedicated neural acceleration and improved ray tracing, using techniques that upscale resolution and generate extra frames so the chip renders only an eighth of final image pixels while reconstructing the rest with AI. Arm claims this enables sustained 30fps gaming with rich ray-traced scenery within a 1W power envelope, with some demonstrated titles reaching 60fps.