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Arm Unveils Client CPU Performance Roadmap Through 2020 - Taking Intel Head On
Today's roadmap now publicly discloses the codenames of the next two generations of CPU cores following the A76 – Deimos and Hercules. Both future cores are based on the new A76 micro-architecture and will introduce respective evolutionary refinements and incremental updates for the Austin cores.
The A76 being a 2018 product – and we should be hearing more on the first commercial devices on 7nm towards the end of the year and coming months, Deimos is its 2019 successor aiming at more wide-spread 7nm adoption. Hercules is said to be the next iteration of the microarchitecture for 2020 products and the first 5nm implementations. This is as far as Arm is willing to project in the future for today's disclosure, as the Sophia team is working on the next big microarchitecture push, which I suspect will be the successor to Hercules in 2021.
Part of today's announcement is Arm's reiteration of the performance and power goals of the A76 against competing platforms from Intel. The measurement metric today was the performance of a SPECint2006 Speed run under Linux while complied under GCC7. The power metrics represent the whole SoC "TDP", meaning CPU, interconnect and memory controllers – essentially the active platform power much in a similar way we've been representing smartphone mobile power in recent mobile deep-dive articles.
Here a Cortex A76 based system running at up to 3GHz is said to match the single-thread performance of an Intel Core i5-7300U running at its maximum 3.5GHz turbo operating speed, all while doing it within a TDP of less than 5W, versus "15W" for the Intel system. I'm not too happy with the power presentation done here by Arm as we kind of have an apples-and-oranges comparison; the Arm estimates here are meant to represent actual power consumption under the single-threaded SPEC workload while the Intel figures are the official TDP figures of the SKU – which obviously don't directly apply to this scenario.
Also at TechCrunch.
See also: Arm Maps Out Attack on Intel Core i5
ARM's First Client PC Roadmap Makes Bold Claims, Doesn't Back Them Up
ARM says its next processors will outperform Intel laptop chips
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 17 2018, @10:29PM (4 children)
It's not arbitrary. The "U-series" 15W TDP laptop CPUs are a particular segment of the market. Pretty low power consumption, but better performance than fanless ~4-8 Watt designs.
ARM wants more powerful ARM chips in laptops. There are already fanless ARM Chromebooks and the like. The 15W i5-XXXXU chips are a bit higher on the ladder. Then above that you have your 28W-35W laptop CPUs, maybe 45W, and so on until you start putting desktop Ryzen or Xeon chips into "mobile workstations".
As for what a (still relatively low performance) ARM laptop can bring to the table, you can find some info about that in the Related stories. I doubt you'll be impressed (4G LTE connectivity can sub in for your missing backdoors).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday August 17 2018, @10:44PM (3 children)
If I am going to gather a bunch of chips and say "let's see how fast these are and how fast per watt they are", that's reasonable.
If I further say "and to mix it up we are going to set a totally not arbitrary limit where no chip may be fed more than 15 watts", then that's less reasonable.
It's the difference between "Best (something) in class" versus "Best (something)".
I realize that ARM is setting the particular target of matching a certain class of chip, but benching well against a severely limited selection of chips != benching well.
I suspect that your doubt is misplaced. Their freedom-friendliness is more important for many use cases than the raw speed of the spy-rootkit chips from Intel and AMD. I have three ARM-based systems running at my desktop (slow ones), and I am evaluating the purchase of a Pine64 RockPro64 for primary desktop use. I find the 4G convenient moreso than a spy feature, but I agree that it could serve the purpose.
I have an old Thinkpad for my laptop (not old enough to be secure) but it will probably be replaced by some ARM laptop when it finally gives up the ghost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @11:00PM (1 child)
The rk3399-based boards are definitely attractive, but I'm going to wait until I see what odroid is coming out with before I make a decision to purchase one or not (they were originally planning a rk3399 board for release this month but it was canceled due to issues sourcing memory, but have said they will announce something new in September IIRC).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @08:10PM
hmm, a dual Gb eth ports with atheros wifi chip capable of AP mode would be cool. add a dedicated sata for nas use? even better.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday August 18 2018, @08:43AM
TFS says the 5W ARM chip matches the single thread performance of a 3.5GHz Intel. The fastest Intel chips, which have 10x or more power consumption, are up to what now? 4.8GHz? Not even 1.5x as fast. The speed difference is negligable compared to the difference in heat dissipation, battery life, and reliability for any portable system.
If ARM's performance really is that close to Intel's then it's silly to call them slow. Back in the old days, before 130nm chips, who would even bother to upgrade for a piddly 1.5x speed up?