Ten Year Anniversary of Core 2 Duo and Conroe: Moore’s Law is Dead, Long Live Moore’s Law

Looking To The Future: Mobile, 32-cores and 8K Displays

The volume of the mobile industry today is certainly a hot topic, especially with Intel scrapping their mobile platform as recently as April 2016. This primarily leaves ARM (who was recently acquired by Softbank) in the driving seat for providing the next decade of mobile processor designs. Because ARM sells licences, both processor licences and architecture licences, a number of ARM’s partners have taken the base instructions and decided to forgo ARM’s core designs for their own. This is why we currently see Samsung with their M1 core, Qualcomm with their Kryo core, and Apple with their Twister cores as well, while Huawei, Mediatek and others are combining parts of ARM’s core designs with various GPU designs either from ARM or Imagination. Getting the right combination of parts, as well as the industrial design, are key elements to the user experience as well as the mobile industry as a whole.

Then of course, Mediatek announced the Helio X20 last year, which is finally now in devices. This is a 10-core part, using a paradigm such that the most relevant cores needed for performance and power consumption are in play at the right time. The creation of a 10-core part made a number of industry analysts wonder which direction this market was going in, as on the one end we have the Helio X20, while Apple’s latest iPhone family were using dual-core designs of Apple’s custom implementation. So if 10-cores are too much, this roadmap might come a little surprising.

As we stand in 2016, this roadmap states we are currently in a 6-core mobile CPU arrangement with 12 GPU cores, with the CPU running at 2.8 GHz. Displays are around the Full-HD mark, with overall board power at 4.42W. Well we certainly have hex-core parts today (2xA57 + 4xA53), 12-core GPUs also exist in Apple’s products, and Samsung’s M1 core is rated at 2.8 GHz. Some phones, such as Sony’s Xperia Z5 Premium, already have 4K screens (8.3MP), which is more geared towards 2020 in this roadmap.

Cycle now from 2016 to 2025, almost 10 years in the future. ITRS’ roadmap states the following:

• 36-cores
• 247 GPU cores
• 4.0 GHz
• 8K Screens (33.2 MP)
• 61.9 GB/s memory bandwidth
• 28 Gbit/s WiFi
• 6.86W Board Power
• 103 cm² board area

Now clearly, for this piece I conferred with our mobile team and I got a lot of confused faces. Even scaling down from 16nm in 2016 to 4nm in 2025, they felt that so many all-purpose cores in a chip (as well as all the GPU cores) was probably excessive, not only in terms of utility but also for 2D floor plan. In order to implement this, more z-height would be needed as well as appropriate 3D technologies in place. Andrei felt the frequency targets were more respectable, and the memory bandwidth would depend on how the silicon designers decided to implement on-package DRAM vs multi-channel implementations. The board power seemed a little excessive, if only because the laws of physics can’t change that drastically, and an increase in +50% board area just means a bigger device.