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ARM's Cortex-A72 and Mali-T880 GPU Announced For 2016 Flagship Smartphones
MojoKid writes ARM's Cortex-A57 is just now starting to break stride with design wins and full-ramp production in new mobile products. However, ARM is releasing a wealth of information on its successor: the Cortex-A72. ARM is targeting a core clock of 2.5GHz for the Cortex-A72 and it will be built using a 14nm/16nm FinFET+ process. Using the Cortex-A15 (NVIDIA Tegra 4, Tegra K1) as a baseline, ARM says that the Cortex-A57 (Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, Samsung Exynos 5433) offers 1.9x the performance. Stepping up to the Cortex-A72, which will begin shipping in next year's flagship smartphones, offers 3.5x the baseline performance of the Cortex-A15. These performance increases are being made within the same power envelope across all three architectures. So in turn, the Cortex-A72 can perform the same workload as the Cortex-A15 while consuming 75 percent less power. Much like the Snapdragon 810, which uses a big.LITTLE configuration (four low-power Cortex-A53 cores paired with four high performance Cortex-A57 cores), future SoCs using the Cortex-A72 will also be capable of big.LITTLE pairings with the Cortex-A53. ARM has also announced its new Mali-T880 GPU, which offers 1.8x the performance of the current generation Mali-T760. Under identical workloads, the Mali-T880 offers a 40 percent reduction in power consumption compared to its predecessor. ARM again also points to optimizations in the Mali-T880 to efficiently support 4K video playback.
based on my experience, the #1 power consumer is... a bad cell signal. If you are at 92% after 8 hours on ANY phone, you are likely sitting in a building with a cell tower a few feet from your head, or you are just straight up lying about your power usage (or both). I've taken a few last-gen phones, put them on airplane mode, then powered up wifi, and they can last over a week. What burns the battery? mobile data access, and the screen.
your last gen phones turn off wifi when in sleep if they last over a week(there's an option for that).
what keeps data connected phones burning battery is being data connected, which leads to phones having stuff running, updating the news, weather and all that shit doesn't come free. lots of stuff that doesn't get waken up if there is no data connection.
so, easiest is to just turn off data when you're not using it. of course you can't then receive skype, gtalk or whatever voip calls or instant messaging on it.....
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The newer SOCs have two high-performance cores and two low power cores. Like the old quadrajet carburetors, efficiency drops quite a bit when the high-perfomance side kicks in.
That said, the screen and radios take up most of the power for most people. Dim the screen and turn off Bluetooth and WiFi as appropriate, or use power-saving mode to automate that process.
No, I'm not claiming that they're wrong - I'm repeating things that they've told me. We have a project with them to investigate good power-efficient scheduling behaviour for precisely this reason: The big.LITTLE configuration does not mean that it's always better to use the little cores, it means that it's better to use the little core for long-running tasks that have a lot of I/O and so can't put the core to sleep, but aren't CPU-bound. If you have something CPU-bound, then you're often better off doing it on the big core and then going back to sleep. Detecting these workloads is not a trivial problem.
There are also some corner cases that are also quite interesting. The A7 has lower latency access to L1 than the A15, so for workloads with a very small working set, running them on the A7 can actually be faster (this shows up in one of the SPEC benchmarks).
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Intel has shiped 14nm Core M CPUs (Broadwell) since december 2014 last year, and these ARM chips will only ship in 2016, so Intel still has a healthy lead.