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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
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday November 05 2020, @04:37PM
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.
sudo mod me up