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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leo_sk - Sunday, June 3, 2018 - link
They had many problems other than target audience. I can give one plus as a counter exampleMatthmaroo - Monday, June 4, 2018 - link
Also Apple has gigantic RD budgetsThink Intel / Qualcomm and AMD are a faction of Apple is size
Matthmaroo - Monday, June 4, 2018 - link
Edit “is” should be ApplesAnd add ARM holding to the list of cpu developers
BillBear - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
We know from TSMC that moving the A12 to their 7nm process will give Apple some significant improvements before we even consider this year's improvements to their design.>Compared to its 10nm FinFET process, TSMC's 7nm FinFET features 1.6X logic density, ~20% speed improvement, and ~40% power reduction.
http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/techn...
joms_us - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
Nonsense, GB was designed to interpolate scores from worthless tasks that don't mean to real-world scenarios. Even iPhone with A11 is no match in speed and performance versus SD845 and Exynos powered Android phones today. You only use GB to compare two similar platform period. There is no way in hell A11 is faster than Skylake or Ryzen. Only ret@rded people will believe on that.BillBear - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
>GB was designed to interpolate scores from worthless tasksGeekbench borrows code from popular open source projects and benchmarks that code running against the same workload on multiple platforms.
For instance, Google's open sourced code to render HTML and DOM in Chrome, Google's code to render PDFs in Chrome, the open sourced LLVM compiler Google now builds the Windows version of Chrome with.
Hardly worthless.
joms_us - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
Oh yeah rendering html, see any speed tests, SD845 phone loads faster than iPhone 8/X. SD845 exports video faster than A11. See my point, just because A9 loads one piece of the whole feature, doesn't mean it it has faster single core than even SD820 which used to have higher score than A9 using prev GB version. See the point? They rigged the scoring system so it would appear Apple SoC is much faster than even Intel or AMD processors LOL.name99 - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
Comparing Apple cores to Intel for browsers gives the same results as GeekBench.My personal comparisons of Wolfram Player on iPad Pro vs MacBook Pro again confirm GB4 results.
Back when we had SPEC2006 numbers for Apple cores, YET AGAIN they confirmed the GB4 results...
If you don't believe the browser results, nothing is stopping you from running something like jetstream on your own devices (and borrowing someone's iPad Pro or iPhone X, since I assume you wouldn't be caught dead owning one).
https://www.browserbench.org/JetStream/
joms_us - Friday, June 1, 2018 - link
Good now load a similar app and website at the same time on iPhone X and AMD or Intel desktop and come back here. Even SD835 slaughtered the A11 on a side by side comparisons. Again the point is, they multiplied the scores on where Apple SoC is faster by nanosec and call it twice faster than competiton LOL. As if nanosec is noticeable in real life scenario =Dlostmsu - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - link
You are being unreasonable. Run JetStream on any of your SD8XX devices, and let parent run it on A11, and let's see. Nobody's going to trust your word here against a reasonable suggestion.