Arm's Cortex-A76 CPU Unveiled: Taking Aim at the Top for 7nm
by Andrei Frumusanu on May 31, 2018 3:01 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Arm
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- SoCs
- Cortex-A76
Conclusion & Thoughts
The Cortex A76 presents itself a solid generational improvement for Arm. We’ve been waiting on a larger CPU microarchitecture for several years now, and while the A76 isn’t quite a performance monster to compete with Apple’s cores, it shows how important it is to have a balanced microarchitecture. This year all eyes were on Samsung and the M3 core, and unfortunately the performance increase came at a great cost of power and efficiency which ended up making the end-product rather uncompetitive. The A76 drives performance up but on every step of the way it still deeply focused on power efficiency which means we’ll get to see the best of both worlds in end products.
In general Arm promises a 35% performance improvement which is a significant generational uplift. Together with the fact that the A76 is targeted to be employed in 7nm designs is also a boost to the projected product.
I’m having some reservations in terms of the performance targets and if vendors will indeed release the SoC with quad-core clock rates of up to 3GHz – based on what I’ve heard from vendors that seems like a rather very optimistic target. Even then, a reduced clock frequency still brings significant benefits, and it’s especially on the efficiency side where Arm should be lauded for continuing to place great focus on.
Whether my projections are correct or not is something we’ll have to see in actual products, but fact is that we *will* see significant efficiency benefits in the next generation of SoCs which should bring both an notable performance improvement as well as battery life improvement to the user. Arm’s focus here on the user experience seems to be exemplary and I hope vendors will be able to implement the core based on Arm’s guidance and reach the targeted metrics.
The Cortex A76 is said to have already come back in working silicon at two partners and we’ll very likely see it shipping in commercial products by the end of the year. I won’t be beating around the bush here as Huawei and HiSilicon’s product cycle schedule makes it obvious that they’re likely one of the launch partners for the product. Qualcomm has also doubled down on using Arm cores in the mobile space so we should also be seeing the next generation Snapdragon SoCs employ the A76. Among the big players, it’s Samsung LSI which is going to have a tough time – the A76 doesn’t seem to greatly outperform the M3, so at least in theory, the M4’s focus will need to be solely on power efficiency. Then again Arm is very open about their design goals; half the area and half the power at similar performance is something that’s going to be hard to compete against.
The Cortex A76 is said to be the baseline microarchitecture on which Arm will iterate over the next 2 generations at least. Arm has been able to execute their yearly beat roadmap on time for 5 generations now and with yearly 20-25% CAGR it’s going to be a very interesting next couple of years as the mobile space is very quickly approaching the performance of desktop CPUs.
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darwiniandude - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
Lots of Apple hate in these comments. Which is fine, nothing wrong with having your own opinion. Performance is important to me - I edit 4K (not for business purposes) from a few Fuji mirrorless bodies quite happily on iOS - on an iPhone X and iPad Pro. My fastest desktop and notebook machines I own currently are both Core2Duo. They simply cannot do it. I’m not a typical use case. I did have a quad i7, but I sold that machine (MacBook Pro) while I could still get a stupidly high amount of money back for it used. Don’t assume that no one on mobile wants high performance ARM cores - not everyone is just using Facebook messenger taking the occasional selfie all day.Also, I remember when AMD smoked Intel at times in the past. People argued, but there was never the “you don’t need that performance” type arguments.
leledumbo - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
That's what Apple is actually doing: single TDP configurable SoC for both their phones and pads (and tops if the rumor come true).The argument is not "you don't need that performance", but "most people don't need that performance". You are one of the few in the performance-needy pool. I know you exist, just not many, and that's what many manufacturers are aware of, so they don't take the Apple route.
hlovatt - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
But this is Anantech. We want the best. We want to push the envelope. I don’t want to read about ho hum performance at a good price. That’s for Consumer Reports or a myriad of other yawn sites.serendip - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
4k editing on an iPad probably won't be using the CPU completely for processing though. There's a lot of stuff that can be passed on to faster and more efficient DSP and IP blocks. I've also run Quicksync encoding on Atom tablets running Windows, it's much faster than using the puny Atom cores directly.darwiniandude - Saturday, June 2, 2018 - link
https://forums.luma-touch.com/viewtopic.php?t=6493 Some discussion of performance on iPad at 4K. It really does work very well. Must be using the GPU also.tipoo - Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - link
Afaik, only playback will use dedicated blocks like Quicksync, editing itself, the rendering of new effects, would be heavily assisted by the GPU and partly on the CPU.techconc - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
The "most people don't need that performance" argument may sound nice to say, but why do you think people buy new phones? They do it when their old phone feels slow,etc. A higher performing phone has a longer effective life span.Using phones as an example, Android has about 85% of the market share for devices sold. Yet, when Apple and Google report their active user base, Android barely maintains a 2:1 ratio over iOS devices. Why? The majority of Android devices sold are low end devices that have a much shorter effective life span.
Meteor2 - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link
I kinda want to buy a new phone, but my Nexus 5X simply doesn't feel slow. So I haven't. And it must have less than half the performance of modern high-end phones.Maxiking - Sunday, June 3, 2018 - link
So another paper dragon, YAY.They promise the same every year, so statistically, if they keep repeating the lie every year, they will get there eventually!
Herkko - Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - link
Tell me how much Nintendo Switch power and energy effiency grow if chance old ARM-cortex A57-A53 new ARM-cortex A76 CPU