from the remember-when-chips-first-reached-1GHz? dept.
Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 865+: Breaking the 3GHz Threshold
Today Qualcomm is announcing an update to its extremely successful Snapdragon 865 SoC: the new Snapdragon 865+. The Snapdragon 865 had already seen tremendous success with over 140 different design wins, powering some of the best Android smartphone devices this year. We're past the hectic spring release cycle of devices, and much like last year with the S855+, for the summer and autumn release cycle, Qualcomm is providing vendors with the option for a higher-performance binned variant of the chip, the new S865+. As a bit of a[n] arbitrary, but also important characteristic of the new chip is that this is the first ever mobile silicon to finally pass the 3GHz frequency mark.
[...] Whilst in relative terms the new chipset's +10% clock improvement isn't all that earth-shattering, in absolute terms it finally allows the new Snapdragon 865+ to be the first mobile SoC to break past the 3GHz threshold, slightly exceeding that mark at a peak 3.1GHz frequency. Ever since the Cortex-A75 generation we've seen Arm make claims about their CPU microarchitectures achieving such high clock frequencies – however in all those years actual silicon products by vendors never really managed to quite get that close in commercial mass-production designs.
We've had a chat with Qualcomm's SVP and GM of mobile business Alex Katouzian, about how Qualcomm achieved this, and fundamentally it's a combination of aggressive physical design of the product as well as improving manufacturing yields during the product's lifecycle. Katouzian explained that they would have been able to achieve these frequencies on the vanilla Snapdragon 865 – but they would have had a lower quantity of products being able to meet this mark due to manufacturing variations. Yield improvements during the lifecycle of the Snapdragon 865 means that the company is able to offer this higher frequency variant now.
This feat should become more common with the arrival of Cortex-X1 ARM cores and the "5nm" and below process nodes.
Related Stories
Arm's New Cortex-A78 and Cortex-X1 Microarchitectures: An Efficiency and Performance Divergence
Today for Arm's 2020 TechDay announcements, the company is not just releasing a single new CPU microarchitecture, but two. The long-expected Cortex-A78 is indeed finally making an appearance, but Arm is also introducing its new Cortex-X1 CPU as the company's new flagship performance design. The move is not only surprising, but marks an extremely important divergence in Arm's business model and design methodology, finally addressing some of the company's years-long product line compromises.
[...] The new Cortex-A78 pretty much continues Arm's traditional design philosophy, that being that it's built with a stringent focus on a balance between performance, power, and area (PPA). PPA is the name of the game for the wider industry, and here Arm is pretty much the leading player on the scene, having been able to provide extremely competitive performance at with low power consumption and small die areas. These design targets are the bread & butter of Arm as the company has an incredible range of customers who aim for very different product use-cases – some favoring performance while some other have cost as their top priority.
All in all (we'll get into the details later), the Cortex-A78 promises a 20% improvement in sustained performance under an identical power envelope. This figure is meant to be a product performance projection, combining the microarchitecture's improvements as well as the upcoming 5nm node advancements. The IP should represent a pretty straightforward successor to the already big jump that were the A76 and A77.
[...] The Cortex-X1 was designed within the frame of a new program at Arm, which the company calls the "Cortex-X Custom Program". The program is an evolution of what the company had previously already done with the "Built on Arm Cortex Technology" program released a few years ago. As a reminder, that license allowed customers to collaborate early in the design phase of a new microarchitecture, and request customizations to the configurations, such as a larger re-order buffer (ROB), differently tuned prefetchers, or interface customizations for better integrations into the SoC designs. Qualcomm was the predominant benefactor of this license, fully taking advantage of the core re-branding options.
[...] At the end of the day, what we're getting are two different microarchitectures – both designed by the same team, and both sharing the same fundamental design blocks – but with the A78 focusing on maximizing the PPA metric and having a big focus on efficiency, while the new Cortex-X1 is able to maximize performance, even if that means compromising on higher power usage or a larger die area.
While Cortex-A78 will only improve performance by around 7% from microarchitectural changes alone, Cortex-X1 will improve performance by up to 30% due to a wider design, doubling of most cache sizes, and other changes. Cortex-X1 cores are also expected to reach 3 GHz on a "5nm" node, delivering even more performance. The Cortex-X1 cores could use up to 50-100% more power than Cortex-A77/A78. Cores could be arranged in a 1+3+4 or 2+2+4 setup of Cortex-X1, Cortex-A78, and Cortex-A55 cores.
See also: Arm Announces The Mali-G78: Evolution to 24 Cores
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @11:30PM (2 children)
If one of these 3GHz devices falls into Trump's hands, he could tweet about twats to twits really quickly.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2020, @01:00AM
Conversely, #CrookedJoe could sent dick picks to the whole DNC twice as fast. By accident.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2020, @05:36AM
If all you think about is Trump maybe you have an issue?
(Score: 1) by petecox on Thursday July 09 2020, @01:39AM (3 children)
So you're shrinking the nanometres but how noisy will the fan be to run a 3GHz phone without throttling!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday July 09 2020, @02:23AM (2 children)
There are a handful of gaming-oriented phones with fans/exhaust:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/29/18522625/nubia-red-magic-3-gaming-phone-release-date-cooling-price-specs-features [theverge.com]
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/03/red-magic-5g-gaming-smartphone-has-144hz-display-internal-cooling-fan/ [arstechnica.com]
But 3 GHz was just inevitable. The same advancements that helped desktop CPUs creep up to 5 GHz and up have helped ARM phone SoCs reach 3 GHz. If new materials and packaging come into play, the clock speeds will be pushed even higher.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by petecox on Thursday July 09 2020, @02:50AM (1 child)
Not a gamer but if there's a market for a 'gaming-phone'...
I'd just expect high performance Snapdragons in a larger enclosure with marginally better heat dissipation such as a Chromebook or Windows tablet.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 09 2020, @03:01AM
Qualcomm makes Snapdragon 8cx, 8c, and 7c and variants for those form factors.
Qualcomm Tech Summit, Day 3: Snapdragon 8cx, the New ACPC SoC [anandtech.com]
Faster Snapdragon 8cx for Windows 10 PCs Reportedly in the Works – Could Break the 3.00GHz Frequency Barrier [wccftech.com]
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/12/07/2322222 [soylentnews.org]
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/12/09/0052233 [soylentnews.org]
The devices containing these SoCs have been overpriced, and x86 software dominance is a problem. Microsoft will supposedly emulate x64 on ARM next year.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2020, @05:53PM
What a waste of humanity's time. Completely shit linux support. Nothing ever just works like x86, and just as proprietary. Fuck everyone who works at Arm. you are all goddamn whores.