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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Arm Unveils Client CPU Performance Roadmap Through 2020 - Taking Intel Head On [anandtech.com]

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 [techcrunch.com].

See also: Arm Maps Out Attack on Intel Core i5 [tomshardware.com]
ARM's First Client PC Roadmap Makes Bold Claims, Doesn't Back Them Up [extremetech.com]
ARM says its next processors will outperform Intel laptop chips [engadget.com]

Related: ARM Based Laptop DIY Kit Ready to Hit the Shops [soylentnews.org]
First ARM Snapdragon-Based Windows 10 S Systems Announced [soylentnews.org]
Laptop and Phone Convergence at CES [soylentnews.org]
Snapdragon 1000 ARM SoC Could Compete With Low-Power Intel Chips in Laptops [soylentnews.org]

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