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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 01 2017, @11:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-core-USED-to-refer-to-a-single-bit-of-memory dept.

MediaTek has released more details of an upcoming 10-core SoC:

MediaTek first unveiled the Helio X30—its next-generation high-end SoC—last fall, but today at Mobile World Congress the Taiwanese company announced its commercial availability. The Helio X30 is entering mass production and should make its debut inside a mobile device sometime in Q2 2017.

The Helio X30, like the Helio X20 family before it, incorporates 10 CPU cores arranged in a Max.Mid.Min tri-cluster configuration. Two of ARM's latest A73 CPU cores replace the two A72s in the Max cluster, which should improve performance and reduce power consumption. The Mid cluster still uses 4 A53 cores, but they receive a 10% frequency boost relative to the top-of-the-line Helio X27. In the X30's Min cluster we find the first implementation of ARM's most-efficient A-series core. The A35 consumes 32% less power than the A53 it replaces (same process/frequency), while delivering 80%-100% of the performance, according to ARM. With a higher peak frequency of 1.9GHz, the X30's A35 cores should deliver about the same or better performance than the X20's A53 cores and still consume less power.

Also at Tom's Hardware, entitled "The 10nm Helio X30 May Be MediaTek's First Truly Competitive High-End Chip".

While some smartphone SoCs like the X30 are a bit of an exception due to cluster configurations, there are going to be many CPUs with 8+ cores sold in 2017. Some examples that come to mind: AMD's Ryzen 7 desktop CPUs, the AMD APUs in the Xbox One, PS4, and PS4 Pro (with 7 cores usable in these consoles), and other smartphone SoCs like the Exynos 7 Octa 7880, which uses equivalent cores rather than clusters. Will games and popular applications be able to exploit this newfound glut of cores?

Related: Samsung's Exynos 8895 to be the First 10nm Chip on the Market


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:57AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:57AM (#473720) Journal

    Ought to help push desktop CPU manufacturers to shrink more.

    Not necessarily. AMD's fortunes are dependent on the fabrication entity they spun off in 2008, GlobalFoundries. Only Intel is independent. The only other "desktop chip" I can think of is POWER9, and that's also made by GlobalFoundries.

    Now we know that Intel is sticking to 14nm for roughly 4 generations of chips (you could say 3.5 if they move some chips to 10nm early). They killed Tick-Tock. Did they do that because AMD didn't represent serious competition, or because their 10nm process is not mature and yields aren't ideal? I'd say the latter. They also compete with Nvidia (Xeon Phi) and IBM/ARM/etc.

    We are nearing the end of the line for "easy" shrinking. 10nm works, 7nm seems to be feasible. 5nm and below? Unknown. Carbon nanotubes or other materials might need to be thrown into the equation. And it's an economic equation [wikipedia.org].

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