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Samsung, Arm Team Up: Expect New Mobile Chipset Faster Than 3GHz (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Arm is teaming up with Samsung's foundry to manufacture the recently announced Cortex-A76 CPU, which the pair say will run at speeds above 3GHz. At that speed the Cortex-A76 will be more powerful than Qualcomm's best Cortex-A75 SoC, the Snapdragon 845, which tops out at 2.8GHz. At launch, Arm said Cortex-A76 chips would even challenge Intel's Core i7 on performance, meaning it could benefit not just smartphones but laptops too, such as "always connected" Windows 10 on Arm devices from HP and Lenovo, which use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835.
The collaboration will involve the Arm-designed chips being manufactured on Samsung's 7LPP (7nm Low Power Plus) and 5LPE (5nm Low Power Early) process technologies, combined with Arm's Artisan physical IP platform. However, it could still be some time before consumers see these high-powered Arm CPUs in devices. Initial production on the 7LPP process is set to begin in the second half of 2018. Samsung says 5LPE, the process technology after 7LPP, will allow greater area scaling and ultra-low power.
The collaboration will involve the Arm-designed chips being manufactured on Samsung's 7LPP (7nm Low Power Plus) and 5LPE (5nm Low Power Early) process technologies, combined with Arm's Artisan physical IP platform. However, it could still be some time before consumers see these high-powered Arm CPUs in devices. Initial production on the 7LPP process is set to begin in the second half of 2018. Samsung says 5LPE, the process technology after 7LPP, will allow greater area scaling and ultra-low power.
More MHz Better!!!
Joke's on you; they're talking about GHz.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I know it can be difficult to read in this day and age, but they did mention laptops. Perhaps that means something.
Due to a combination of ads, trackers, auto-loading, self-playing video, and massive gobs of Javascript, the modern web page has become a bloated monstrosity that requires exceptionally powerful hardware to render. Also, as computers become more ubiquitous, the number of programming jobs increases without changes to the overall number of skilled programers. As such, we need more powerful CPUs to deal with all the poorly optimized code for those ads, trackers, etc.
Except that Apple doesn't use ARM-designed cores. They make their own.
I worked for $BigNameChipCo some 10-15 years ago. Back then there were 4 foundries: a, b, c, and Intel. Chip version A from foundry A was considered a completely separate beast from same chip from foundry B.
My company cross-licensed stuff from ARM, but the resulting chips came from foundry's A, B, or C. None of those foundries were named Samsung, ARM, nor Intel.
Having Samsung and ARM join up to make faster clock speeds just don't work. Neither Samsung nor ARM are in the business of cranking up clock speeds.
Joke's on you, GHz is made up of MHz!
#DeleteFacebook
If Samsung can do it, Apple can do it too. They're always neck-to-neck for their smartphone CPUs, just like Intel and AMD.
#DeleteFacebook
If Samsung can do it, Apple can do it too. They're always neck-to-neck for their smartphone CPUs, just like Intel and AMD.
Actually, historically, they are at least a generation past Qualcomm.
With raw CPU performance and IPC the A76 should win every time for cpu restricted tasks. Other tasks may be varied more based on the full SOC, which given the A76 has takes up slightly more die area, it's more of a toss-up. Any way you cut it though, it looks like the A76 is very lean and mean modern chip, though it's still not going to compete flat out with an i7, even a mobile one on intensive tasks. Where it's be competitive is on workloads where the Intel processor is having trouble finding a lot of instruction level parallelism. A four-core A76 might be close to a two-core Intel with hyper-threading and clocked down to mobile speeds for many tasks, but I expect Intel has a better branch predictor, rename, and floating point units, which impact real-world performance.
That isn't the news here. Samsung already makes chips, and they're incrementally faster, same as chips from other fabs.
The news here is that they're teaming up with ARM and ARM is going to provide a bunch of logic compilers and IP blocks that are used to connect other IP blocks together. Remember, ARM chip designs don't come with peripherals; they're just the CPU. Their customers design the rest of the chip. So this deal also will bring some other ARM IP blocks to the Samsung offering.
Expect most of the chips that eventually get manufactured using the technologies in this story to have some other company's name on the silkscreen. And if you try to choose Qualcomm for that use case you'll find out how much slower it is to customize! You'll be bribing them for years just to get into negotiations, because that isn't their business model.
Except that Apple doesn't use ARM-designed cores. They make their own.
Uhhh... Yes they do - all of the A-series chips used in iOS products are ARM Based. Meaning they license the ARM chip design, modify it, then send it off to be manufactured.
Operating frequency, ie 3ghz is not the same thing as faster. Processor speed at completing tasks is a complicated mix of frequency, IPC and several other factors. Even at 200mhz faster the Qualacomm chip could still be significantly faster.
ARM collaborates not only with Samsung.
...
From https://www.design-reuse.com/n...
"ARM and TSMC announced a multi-year agreement to collaborate on a 7nm FinFET process technology which includes a design solution for future low-power, high-performance compute SoCs"
And on the frequency side of things
From https://www.anandtech.com/show...
"With the CLN5, TSMC will also offer an Extremely Low Threshold Voltage (ELTV) option that will enable its clients to increase frequencies of their chips by 25% "
Taking 2.8GHz as baseline, a 25% increase of frequency would land the new chip at 3.5GHz.
While it is true that the new chip might not be running 25% faster, it still able to run at 3.5GHz, rather than 2.8GHz.
"Meaning they license the ARM chip design, modify it, then send it off to be manufactured."
I think how it works is that Apple and Qualcomm treat an ARM core as a black box with just interface specifications. Kind of like how you'd by an IC, except that you don't solder it but rather draw it in a chip design. Qualcomm/Apple decide how to interface cores with the other stuff that's on a SoC (modems, GPU, memory bus, USB logic, power management). The SoC designer never* gets to see what's inside the ARM core; that knowledge is only shared with the fab company (e.g. TSMC, Samsung). In turn, the fab company has the details of how to make the individual transistors on the chip and only tells ARM (and other customers) how big the transistors are and what their electrical characteristics are.
I'm not sure how it works with Samsung, which both has fabs and designs SoCs.
*Well, of course there is a lot of reverse engineering going on in the industry...
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
No, Apple and Qualcomm have microarchitecture licenses (as do a few other companies. Marvell has the original license inherited from Intel who got it from Compaq via DEC). In this case, all Apple and Qualcomm get are the instruction sets and validation suite. They have complete freedom to design the CPU core as they wish. Apple's ARM cores are some of the fastest on the market. Qualcomm had their own 32-bit core, but now their 64-bit cores are derived from ARM's 64-bit designs. Marvell has XScale, but I haven't heard much from them as of late. I think they just use it as a network management processor.
Other ARM licensees like RockChip, Allwinner, Broadcom, etc, license the blocks only. They can assemble the blocks to form an SoC, but they have to buy it pretty much as a black box. They get the IP core and can synthesize it using tools, but thats as far as it goes. They can't tweak it at all.
I can't remember if Samsung has a microatchitecture license or not - I think they do as Exynos of late beats the crap out of Qualcomm's offerings. (Alas, Apple's last year chip still beats the current Exynos which beats Qualcomm's latest 835 chip).
I think Samsung needed the help more to they can get their Exynos up to Apple's performance levels.
The real problem is of course, how far away you are from the fab. Apple works with TSMC and Samsung to get their designs done for the fab, so you can tweak things a lot to get your yields in your favor. Samsung knows their own fabs so they can tweak as well. Qualcomm Kyro cores are derived from ARM's cores, so I think that's why they work (they're probably tuned for the fabs Qualcomm uses). Everyone else gets generic synthesizable and cannot tune it heavily for the fab, so you get great performance, but it's out of a generalized core.
Slashdot really needs a "-1 Retarded" option for moderation.
No sig today...
Arm said Cortex-A76 chips would even challenge Intel's Core i7 on performance only when running native code
FTFY.
There aren't that many native Windows ARM applications so far.
Uh, the difference between 2.8GHz and 3GHz is about 7% .. not a lot when you consider the Apple A11, due to its larger die area, scores 15% more than the Qualcomm 845 in all the benchmark tests.
Exactly right, and thus you need 3Ghz in your pocket. And in your other pocket, a small refrigerator for additional cooling. And in a third pocket, a small nuclear reactor to power it all.
Time to stop offloading work onto the client and keep it in the cloud server where it belongs
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I would like to have a faster phone, but I already kill my battery to quickly. And the days of swapping batteries out are long gone.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Wrong. They license the ISA and build their own custom-designed cores around that. This is as stupid as saying that AMD cores use Intel cores just because they both use the x86 ISA.
Oh goodie! The twitter, facebook & pokemon apps will launch 0.000001 seconds faster, really enhancing my user experience.
Their statement was well beyond someone being ignorant and was straight into someone who had no idea what they were talking about but proclaiming to be knowledgable. AKA someone that is stupid.
Um, no, all of Apple's SoCs use ARM-designed cores.
Um, no, they don't. You're plainly an idiot.
What on earth made you think otherwise?
Facts and reality? Apple has an architectural license to ARM ISAs, but they do not use Cortex cores in their SoCs. They make their own cores based off the ARM ISA. Hence, they do not use the ARM-designed cores but their own designs that share an ISA. Again, as I point out above this is as dumb as saying that AMD uses Intel-designed cores simply because they share an ISA.
Give it a try.