SoylentNews

takyon writes:

ARM has announced its latest CPU, promising "laptop-class" performance:

So what is the Cortex A76? In Arm's words, it's a "laptop-class" performance processor with mobile efficiency. The vision of the A76 as a laptop-class processor had been emphasised throughout the TechDay presentation so it seems Arm is really taking advantage of the large performance boost of the IP to cater to new market segments such as the emerging "Always connected PCs" which Qualcomm is spearheading with their SoC platforms.

[...] In broad metrics, what we're promised in actual products using the A76 is the follows: a 35% performance increase alongside 40% improved power efficiency. We'll also see a 4x improvements in machine learning workloads thanks to new optimisations in the ASIMD pipelines and how dot products are handled. These figures are baselined on A75 configurations running at 2.8GHz on 10nm processes while the A76 is projected by Arm to come in at 3GHz on 7nm TSMC based products.

The new CPU is naturally still compatible with DynamIQ's common cluster topology and Arm envisions designs to be paired with Cortex A55s as the little more power efficient CPUs. The configuration scalability of the DynamIQ IP again was reiterated and we were presented with example configurations such as 1+7 or 2+6 with either Cortex A75 or A76 CPU IP. This presentation slide was one of the rare ones where Arm referred to the area size of the A76, pointing out that the A75 still had better PPA and thus might still be a valid design choice for companies, depending on their needs. One comparison that was made during the event is that in terms of area, three A76's with larger caches would fit inside the size of a Skylake core – all while within 10% of the IPC of the Intel CPU, but obviously there's also process node scaling considerations to take into account.

Original Submission