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Arm Cortex-A78C Core Announced for Laptops

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday November 04 2020, @06:03PM   Printer-friendly

takyon writes:

Arm Cortex-A78C core supports up to 8 cores per cluster, 8MB L3 cache for always-on laptops

Arm Cortex-A78 CPU core was first introduced in May 2020 with a focus on mobile devices like smartphones and was followed by Cortex-A78AE for automotive and industrial embedded applications in September.

The company has now introduced a new variant with Arm Cortex-A78C supporting up to eight cores per cluster, a larger cache up to 8MB for higher performance, and advanced security features all designed for always-on laptops and other "on-the-go" devices.

[...] All those improvements will provide increased performance in laptops, likely at the cost of higher power consumption, but considering Arm laptop often get over 20 hours of battery life, it may be a worthwhile compromise to lose a couple of hours of battery life for higher performance.

This is being seen as a reaction to Apple's custom ARM SoCs for Macs, which are expected to be announced within a week. A successor to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx could use 8 "big" cores.

Also at Wccftech.

Previously: ARM Announces Cortex-A78 and Cortex-X1

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  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday November 04 2020, @09:32PM (7 children)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday November 04 2020, @09:32PM (#1073143) Journal

    I've seen some ridiculous perf-per-watt benchmarks out of Apple A-series silicon. How does the A78C compare? I'd definitely be interested in something small, compact, and powerful if it's at least Haswell level in, say, 1/8th the power envelope.

    But miss me with that "always-on" bullshit. I want a laptop with the battery life of a Moto Power-series phone and similar ability to idle for a week straight, not to be wasting its cycles and battery sending heaven knows what telemetry to hell knows where.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 04 2020, @09:57PM (5 children)

    by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Wednesday November 04 2020, @09:57PM (#1073154) Journal

    ARM designs have typically been slower than custom Apple ARM designs. Cortex-X1 should be faster than Cortex-A78C, and even that is unlikely to catch up to the latest Apple cores.

    https://www.androidauthority.com/arm-cortex-x1-vs-apple-1121289/ [androidauthority.com]

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    • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Thursday November 05 2020, @06:56AM (4 children)

      by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Thursday November 05 2020, @06:56AM (#1073315) Homepage Journal

      ARM designs have typically been slower than custom Apple ARM designs.

      I'm confused. ARM licenses their technology, and Apple makes better custom chips. What exactly is Apple paying for? An ARM instruction set basically? Sorry, I don't quite get it.

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      • (Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday November 05 2020, @07:21AM

        by driverless (4770) on Thursday November 05 2020, @07:21AM (#1073318)

        What exactly is Apple paying for? An ARM instruction set basically?

        At the moment, yes, while they still need ARM, but give it a few years...

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday November 05 2020, @04:37PM

        by TheRaven (270) on Thursday November 05 2020, @04:37PM (#1073455) Journal

        What exactly is Apple paying for?

        In the first instance, for a fairly exhaustive compliance test suite so that each generation of their implementation is pretty much guaranteed to be backwards compatible.

        The main thing that they're getting of value is to outsource a large amount of the ecosystem cost. Apple develops their OS, but their toolchain and assembly fast paths in a load of libraries that they (and third-party software on their platform) use are not Apple-only. This is a big cost reduction for them, maintaining your own ISA is estimated to cost at least one or two billion dollars.

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      • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday November 09 2020, @10:19AM

        by TheRaven (270) on Monday November 09 2020, @10:19AM (#1075081) Journal
        Oh, one more thing: the Arm partnership agreement is a broad patent cross-licensing agreement that covers patents held by any of the members, for the purpose of implementing Arm ISAs. Anything Samsung, Qualcomm, nVidia, or whoever has developed that is covered under that agreement is available for Apple to use in Arm cores, but it would not be available for implementing other cores. This also gives some good defensive cover against Intel. I don't know if there's a cross-licensing deal formally between the Arm partnership and Intel, but if not then I am reasonably confident that Intel is almost certainly violating at least one patent held by the Arm ecosystem and so would kick off a load of counter-suits if they tried to sue anyone for implementing Arm. If they did the same against an Apple ISA then none of the defensive patents would apply and Apple would have to find some Apple-owned patents that Intel infringed (much harder).
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      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday November 21 2020, @01:45AM

        by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Saturday November 21 2020, @01:45AM (#1080049) Journal

        AFAIK, Apple has a "perpetual license" for the ARM architecture for being early [wikipedia.org], and has better terms than the other members.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday November 05 2020, @09:01PM

    by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Thursday November 05 2020, @09:01PM (#1073541) Journal

    This is from today's AnandTech 5950X and 5900X review:

    Page 3 [anandtech.com]

    Being an x86 core, of the difficulties of the ISA is the fact that instructions are of a variable length with encoding varying from 1 byte to 15 bytes. This has been legacy side-effect of the continuous extensions to the instruction set over the decades, and as modern CPU microarchitectures become wider in their execution throughput, it had become an issue for architects to design efficient wide decoders. For Zen3, AMD opted to remain with a 4-wide design as going wider would have meant additional pipeline cycles which would have reduced the performance of the whole design.

    Page 4 [anandtech.com]

    I do hope that these designs come in a timely fashion with impressive changes, as the competition from the Arm side is definitely heating up, with designs such as the Cortex-X1 or the Neoverse-V1 appearing to be more than a match for lower-clocked Zen3 designs (such as in the server/enterprise space). On the consumer side of things, AMD appears to be currently unrivalled, although we’ll be keeping an eye open for the upcoming Apple silicon.

    Page 9 [anandtech.com]

    https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16214/119125.png [anandtech.com]

    In the performance per clock uplifts, measured at peak performance, we’re seeing a 20.87% median and 24.99% average improvement for the new Zen3 microarchitecture when compared to last year’s Zen2 design. AMD is still quite behind Apple’s A13 and A14 (review coming soon), but that’s natural given the almost double the microarchitectural width of Apple’s design, running at lower frequencies. It’ll be interesting to get Apple Silicon Mac devices tested and compared against the new AMD parts.

    [...] What I hope to see from AMD in future designs is a more aggressive push towards a wider core design with even larger IPC jumps. In workloads that are more execution bound, Zen3 isn’t all that big of an uplift. The move from a 16MB to a 32MB L3 cache isn’t something that’ll repeated any time soon in terms of improvement magnitude, and it’s also very doubtful we’ll see significant frequency uplifts with coming generations. As Moore’s Law is slowing, going wider and smarter seems to be the only way forward for advancing performance.

    https://twitter.com/andreif7/status/1324431700663930889 [twitter.com]
    https://twitter.com/andreif7/status/1324436277970829315 [twitter.com]

    Obviously, there are things that can be improved, and advantages that could be leveraged to perform better when compared to Apple/ARM. One of the things rumored for Zen 4 is a nice big (gigabytes) L4 cache (e.g. HBM) stacked on top of the I/O die. Ultimately, decreasing the distance between cores and memory is one of the best ways to improve performance, and putting towers of cache around is an intermediate step. The L3 cache could be layered up [soylentnews.org], for instance.

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