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.

Comments

Samsung rumored to drop 810 due to overheating

[JoeyRox]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

Re:Samsung rumored to drop 810 due to overheating

[Noah Haders]

in scandinavian countries, overheating is a desired attribute. cold weather really hurts batteries, so if the phone generates a little internal heat it prolongs battery life.

Re:Samsung rumored to drop 810 due to overheating

[Kjella]

Only if you got one of those new 5-6" "phones" that don't fit in your pocket, otherwise you usually have an ample supply of body heat that far exceeds what the phone will provide. And Scandinavia is not ridiculously cold, it's been colder in the lower 48 (Montana) than anywhere here, it's not Alaska or Siberia. You might have heard that Norway is a big country for Tesla? We wouldn't be if the batteries kept freezing to death.

And if you want to spend battery, launch Skype. I swear that even with no chatting it cuts the stand-by time of my phone in half. I don't know exactly what it's doing, but it's by far the worst application I got on my phone. It's the first thing to go if I need to conserve battery, text me if you need me.

Re:...while consuming 75 percent less power

[ebrandsberg]

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.

like the quadrajet carb, the big is BIG in big.lit

[raymorris]

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.

Android holding it back

[Anonymous Coward]

Android holding ARM back.

They have desktop class processors held back by an OS that won't run multiple apps on a screen at once (well without Samsungs extensions it won't). Meanwhile the head of Android is focusing on Chrome at the expense of Android. As if a Chrome wrapper for Android to let it do multiple windows is somehow acceptable!

Its' ridiculous that ARM chips drive > 4K screens and yet Android has the calculator full screen.

And while people and business expect their desktop PCs to be professional and private, Google has made Android into a nasty piece of user tracking spyware thanks to their core ad business.

It's a pity Microsoft invested in Cyanogenmod because that would be the obvious fresh Android candidate to get multiple windows and privacy, the two big weaknesses of Android, to compete in the desktop market. Now with Microsoft's money they are unlikely to tackle the desktop.

What we need is a fork of Android with privacy controls put in and a new design of multiple windows to cope with touch instead of mouse. So no more fiddly maximize buttons, and old WIMP controls, but support for multiple windows.

Re:like the quadrajet carb, the big is BIG in big.

[Tough Love]

Like the old quadrajet carburetors, efficiency drops quite a bit when the high-perfomance side kicks in.

Not necessarily. Efficiency can actually increase If the high power cores are able to bring the whole system to a low power state sooner.

Re:...while consuming 75 percent less power

[AK Marc]

My Galaxy S3 will not last an hour playing angry birds (it's a great entertainer for the kids, when we find we are stuck somewhere we have to wait a while). For pure standby, it eats about 10% per hour. Much better when in airplane mode with all apps forcebly closed, but then it's not a phone, but a tiny tablet with no connnection.

You're much smarter than ARM's chip designers.

[raymorris]

You realize you're claiming that ARM's chip architects are completely wrong and have been for a while now, now? You know they actually measure this stuff before they spend a few billion dollars fabbing chips.

  >. can consume less energy to power one of the big cores for 250ms than power the little core for 1s

If you need to do 500 million operations, you're close to to the point where it makes sense to power the faster core, yes. Your phone spends 99% of it's time with picoseconds of CPU work to be done, not seconds or milliseconds of work.

Re:You're much smarter than ARM's chip designers.

[TheRaven64]

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).

Lower NM size than desktop CPUs

[Billly Gates]

AMD is stuck still at 28 nm while these are 14. Wow.

Even the latest intel ones are all 22 nm

Re:Lower NM size than desktop CPUs

[the Hewster]

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.

Re:Lower NM size than desktop CPUs

[Kjella]

I'm fairly sure AMD has pretty much quit making new designs and is exiting the market, same as Bulldozer. The APU sales are tanking, they did a $57 million inventory write-down on top of a $56 million operating loss on $662 million revenue in the "Computing and Graphics" segment last quarter and is forecasting another 15% decline in revenue. Corrizo is probably coming but I expect only incremental improvements, they're diversifying into so many other things there can't possibly be any money left for the R&D they'd need to create a new architecture.

Sure they can do die shrinks, that's not so hard but a premium process costs premium money and AMD can't afford it, they need a value process to sell value chips. And it all depends on Samsung, Apple and TSMC - ARM can create the design but they still need to succeed with the production process. Intel struggled, maybe that's just Intel or it'll be tough for everybody. In AMDs position they certainly don't want to jump the gun and suffer delays or and immature process with bad yields. I expect they'll og 20nm once Apple has moved to 14/16nm and not before.