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.

Comments

Re:Ah back to the old Mhz fight of the early 2000'

[fahrbot-bot]

More MHz Better!!!

Joke's on you; they're talking about GHz.

Re:Pentium 4 again?

[alvinrod]

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.

Re:Does Samsung have a foundry?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems Samsung has many fabs, but perhaps two of them do microprocessors. So it seems they are in the business of cranking up clock speeds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants

Re:New Macbook incoming

[tlhIngan]

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.

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.