Arm unveils 7nm Cortex-A76 CPU • Hacker News Board

Re: Arm unveils 7nm Cortex-A76 CPU

#61

Post by supernova87a » Wed, Jun 06, 2018, 4:06 AM UTC

fpgaminer wrote: post #43

supernova87a wrote: post #33

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 o…

You've got the right general idea already :) > 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? Most consumers of ARM cores are simply interested in integrating them into a larger design; usually an SoC. Not so much in tweaking performance, though certainly they'll choose whether to prioritize perfo…

That's amazing -- I think I can understand most of what you described. Especially liked the P&R part of it. It's like you have blocks of things of different sizes that could be arbitrarily placed on a checkerboard (or maybe a Go board is more fitting). And each one has hundreds of different length spaghetti wires coming off, that need to be connected to every other block. How do you start arranging them -- it could be infinite possibilities, but you have to start with initial guesses and do some kind of minimization and see the lowest "cost" solution that meets your needs. Repeat.

Thanks!

Re: Arm unveils 7nm Cortex-A76 CPU

#62

Post by jjtheblunt » Wed, Jun 06, 2018, 12:50 PM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #25

rockdoe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company employed a 150-person engineering team which included people who had previously worked on processors like Itanium, Opteron and UltraSPARC. Also principal designers of the DEC Alpha and the StrongARM, FWIW. They hired some of the best and most experienced in the business. You get what you pay for.

They also bought Intrinsity, who designed the enhanced Cortex-A8 cores used in the Apple A4 and early Samsung Exynos SoCs.

And early Snapdragon, no?

Re: Arm unveils 7nm Cortex-A76 CPU

#63

Post by gsnedders » Wed, Jun 06, 2018, 5:19 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #38

gsnedders wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!).

Yeah, you borderline need an L2 for any multicore systems. L2's main job on most designs is coherency and reducing the explosion of bandwidth needs from the cores all vying for the main memory bus.

Yeah, I was amazed when I was told it before. Obviously should've checked their sources. :)

Re: Arm unveils 7nm Cortex-A76 CPU

#64

Post by ant6n » Wed, Jun 06, 2018, 9:56 PM UTC

solarkraft wrote: post #41

awill wrote: post #31

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 releasi…

The difference is that Apple's chips are only in Apple devices and not on the market for anyone to build a system around - So the other chips are all we have.

Indeed. I'd like to buy a Chromebook with an Apple arm chip.

Re: Arm unveils 7nm Cortex-A76 CPU

#65

Post by atomicnumber1 » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 2:22 AM UTC

ClassyJacket wrote: post #9

atomicnumber1 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think apple had this huge lead when they introduced x64 out of the blue. Over time other players will catch up, I guess. But yeah, apple's engineering team have been doing an excellent job. I'm excited about google's inclusion though. They already make great tpu's.

Pretty sure you meant ARM64 not x86 :) But yeah, the SoC in the iPhone 5S was crazy fast at the time, plus they have other advantages like Secure Enclave, and a smartwatch with ACTUAL all day battery life. I owned a Sony phone with a Snapdragon 810, which was Qualcomm's first high-end 64-bit chip... and it overheated at the drop of a hat. The phone was more or less unusable in Australian summer. Everything I read at…

Yes exactly.

Re: Arm unveils 7nm Cortex-A76 CPU

#66

Post by atomicnumber1 » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 2:24 AM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #27

ClassyJacket wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure you meant ARM64 not x86 :) But yeah, the SoC in the iPhone 5S was crazy fast at the time, plus they have other advantages like Secure Enclave, and a smartwatch with ACTUAL all day battery life. I owned a Sony phone with a Snapdragon 810, which was Qualcomm's first high-end 64-bit chip... and it overheated at the drop of a hat. The phone was more or less unusable in Australian summer. Everything I read at…

Apple is so ridiculously ahead in the ARM chip market... imagine if they'd sell to 3rd parties and the single thread performance on these laptops was 2x. Makes me wonder if they are about to make the same move on the lower speed MacBooks.

They already have a arm chipset working as controller in the latest iMac. I'm sure their end goal would be to get rid of intel as soon as they can. Using intel chipset gives them uncertainty. It leaves control out of their hand.

Re: Arm unveils 7nm Cortex-A76 CPU

#67

Post by valuearb » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 4:19 AM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #13

djrogers wrote: post #2

So the newest Cortex will roughly match the 2016 Apple A10 CPU? No wonder so many android tablets are painfully slow...

You need to compare few things other than raw performance. Latest Apple chips are humongous for ARM based SoCs. This is in big part due to them having bigger caches than some server CPUs.

Not so humongous they can’t fit in one of the thinnest phones.