Arm unveils 7nm Cortex-A76 CPU

I do find these articles frustrating. They continue to rave about ARM (or Qualcomm) improvements, while casually mentioning that they're at least 2 years behind Apple. Being 2-3 years behind Apple should be front and centre of the article. It's a big deal! Unfortunately, as an Android user, I don't have a choice, and I suspect my next phone will have an SD845.

You didn't see that kind of leniency when AMD was releasing slow/inefficient CPUs pre Zen.

I'm not a hardware knowledgable guy, but would love to read/hear an intro about what chip design is all about (at a lay person's level I guess).

I understand that ARM sells core designs, and that each company assembles them / designs them in the way suits their performance needs, and then gets them manufactured?

But what does that really mean? What is the "user" doing? Are they arranging them like kids' Lego blocks on a die surface? Dragging and dropping blocks of code? Are they tweaking the voltage settings? Are they combining them in ways that do sequential operations special to them? What's the added step here? Like, why doesn't ARM just create the chips that the end OEMs want?

Is it like cooking or chemistry? What's the closest analogy? I would love to get a more intuitive feel about what chip design is all about.

Thanks!

I'm struggling to find the one I was thinking of, maybe I'm just imagining it. Most things I can find are 256kB/core, which is the same as most Intel chips (though the A11 is over 1MB/core!).

The end result is that people who prefer Android devices are still stuck paying iPhone money for a phone that has much, much lower single threaded performance.

ARM designs processors, but just the processor. I̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶a̶d̶d̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶i̶p̶h̶e̶r̶a̶l̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶i̶t̶;̶ (also wrong here, apparently they make plenty of peripherals)., that's the job of the vendor who uses the processor and integrates it with RAM, Flash, protocol hardware (SPI, I2C, Serial, USB, etc), Timers, and all the other goodies that make a microcontroller easier to use because you dont need fifteen other chips to get it doing what you want it to do.Imagine needing to buy a separate chip so you can speak I2C, another to speak SPI, another to have a counter running and interrupt the processor every X seconds, another to store program memory, another to convert analog signal to digital; it would be unwieldly, so these vendors take the processor and attach these peripherals and say "the processor can use this peripheral by writing 0xAB to its register located at 0x12345678.

So you can think of ARM as designing the engine, and the vendors as taking the engine design then adding the rest of the cars features (chassis, electronics, navigation, etc) around it, then building and selling it.

"Why don't the vendors just design their own processor to go with their own peripherals?" you might ask. Well designing a processor is MUCH harder to do well than any of the individual peripherals. There is a lot more going on with a processor and it's at least an order of magnitude more complex than any of the peripherals that go with it. But that doesn't mean it's not done; Atmel designed the AVR architecture and this is the processor architecture that dominates the Arduino world. Atmel sells microcontrollers with their AVR architecture processor and their own peripheral designs as well. But AVR is mostly 8-bit and they can't compete with the performance of ARMs 32-bit designs; which is why you see ARM is most embedded applications.

The design for the processor is made in a program that lets you "lay out" the hardware at the transistor level and specify processes for it (like a lithographic mask) but ARM never carries out these processes, these must be taken care of by a fabrication facility. Oftentimes these vendors don't even have fabs themselves, they just design the rest of the "car" and then have it fab'ed by a third party.

~A̶R̶M̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶e̶s̶i̶g̶n̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶i̶p̶h̶e̶r̶a̶l̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶f̶a̶b̶r̶i̶c̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶i̶p̶s̶ ̶(̶i̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶a̶b̶,̶ ̶n̶o̶r̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶l̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶3̶r̶d̶ ̶p̶a̶r̶t̶y̶ ̶f̶a̶b̶s̶)̶.̶~ (Looks like i'm totally wrong here, also why doesn't HN have strikethrough comments implemented?). They do what they do - design processors - and they do it really well, so well in fact that vendors are more than willing to pay for a license to use their processors in their own chips so that the vendor doesn't have to deal with the headache of making a really good processor.