Rushil Agrawal / Android Authority
TL;DR Future Android processors will support SME2 for faster machine learning running directly on the CPU.
The improvements look set to appear with Arm’s upcoming mobile CPU core.
Developers using Arm’s KleidiAI won’t have to change anything to benefit.
Despite its naysayers, AI features remain the cornerstone of modern smartphone innovation. But powering the latest and greatest AI tools quickly and efficiently requires processors that are up to the task, whether a dedicated AI accelerator or a CPU equipped with special instructions to accelerate machine learning workloads.
In a blog post, Arm detailed more about what to expect from its Scalable Matrix Extension 2 (SME2) CPU extension and teased that the trick will be coming to future Android smartphones whenever it drops its next-gen mobile CPUs. Based on previous announcements, this will likely happen in the next few months and will be rebranded under Lumex rather than the old Cortex brand.
For a quick overview, SME, originally part of the Armv9 architecture, is a set of optional, advanced CPU architecture extensions explicitly designed to accelerate matrix math operations — the type of complex multiplication that machine learning algorithms rely on. SME2, which actually debuted around the end of 2022, builds on these features, which, according to Arm, enable real-time mobile inference tasks, from image and natural language processing to voice generation.
SME2 speeds up AI workloads on your CPU, and it's coming soon to future Android phones.
Arm also shares some numbers, which certainly make SME2 look like the real deal. According to Arm, Google’s Gemma 3 model delivers 6x faster AI responses with SME2-enhanced hardware than without. It can run a text summary of 800 words in under one second on just a single CPU core, though it’s unclear which CPU Arm refers to here.
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