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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
123 Comments
View All Comments
lmcd - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
They're at the mercy of chipmakers. The only companies that would buy such a core have already left reference designs behind. Everyone else wants small, cheap chips, so much so that we've had A53-only designs in the entire middle-and-lower range. Will anyone even use the A76? I don't know if that's guaranteed.vladx - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
Read the last part of the article, it's almost guaranteed next Kirin is skipping the A75.and going directly to A76. I think Huawei is done playing catch-up.darkich - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
It's so frustrating how even you people who are into SoC's already forget that Apple was basically cheating the customers with secret huge compromises, just to be able to put unbalanced and owerpowered cores in the iPhones.Zoolookuk - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
Wow, I've seen some seriously bad anti-Apple comments over the last 30 years, but this is probably the best one yet. A10 and A11 are not unbalanced and not 'cheating' customers. Anyone with half a brain can the history of this advantage Apple has started with A7, which was the first 64-bit ARM-based SoC in phones. Ever since they, they've been consistently 2 generations ahead of the competition, and that gap shows no sign of closing.The comments below this that 'at 3ghz' the (still unreleased) A76 would 'only need a 20% boost' to match last year's A11 is pretty funny. So a chip already at its thermal and power limit "only" needs to be overclocked by 20% to match a chip designed two years ago running 40% slower.
techconc - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
Actual device performance easily disproves your claim. Your comment isn't helpful and you would have more credibility if you at least attempted to justify the claim you made.jjj - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
In reality Apple is the one behind but won't bother to explain, just remember the core count for Apple's solutions.Anyway, A76 at 3GHz and 750mW per core would require less than a 20% boost in clocks to match Apple's A11 in Geekbench.
Apple has only 2 large cores and when including the 4 small ones, the SoC throttles hard under 100% load
If that is what you want, A76 should be able to deliver something close enough when configured as dual core with stupid high clocks. A SoC vendor could push A76 to 2W-3W per core instead of 0.75W and get clocks as high as possible.
But maybe it's better to have more than enough perf, 4 cores and sane efficiency.
Lolimaster - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
Please stop using geekbench as a comparison tool specially between 2 different ARM ecosystems.jjj - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
You have results for Apple on anything else?Elstar - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
Because, crazy as it sounds, most ARM's customers don't want fast off the shelf designs, at least at first. ARM's whole business model is rather simple: they sell simple, affordable, efficient, and feature rich reference designs as a "gateway drug". Once you get hooked on their ecosystem, then they charge a lot for nontrivial customization.name99 - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
This is like asking "why doesn't Apple come out with a 5GHz A12?" It's not so much that they can't as that this does not make sense for their business model.You can SAY that you want (and would be willing to pay for) Apple level's of performance, but is that really true? God knows Android people complain all the time about how expensive Apple products are, and they MOSTLY buy the midrange phones, not the high end phones. Essential just went bust assuming that more people want to pay for high end Android phones than actually exist.