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New Arm cores deliver up to 40% better performance
- pella 3y agoimho: better link: "Arm Unveils 2023 Mobile CPU Core Designs: Cortex-X4, A720, and A520 - the Armv9.2 Family" https://www.anandtech.com/print/18871/arm-unveils-armv92-mobile-architecture-cortex-x4-a720-and-a520-64bit-exclusive https://www.anandtech.com/print/18871/arm-unveils-armv92-mob... ( posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36109734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36109734 )
- ksec 3y agoMuch better article. May be @dang could change the submission link? I keep thinking if I should dig up and repost all the bookmarked link from people who keep blasting Apple is and always will be 5 years ahead of everybody. And these are prominent member in their programming / tech circles. I hope Anandtech does another detail article on their GPU as well. While I am not a fan of Mali but still want a detailed analysis on Immortalis. Another question worth exploring would be how good are the other IPs from Mediatek. From Modem, I/O, DSP, NPU as compared to Snapdragon. As Mediatek is now competing directly with Qualcomm in flagship SoC.
- jtbayly 3y agoIs anybody caught up yet? I couldn’t find any comparison to the M1 in this article, and it doesn’t sound like this chip is being produced yet…
- photochemsyn 3y agoSounds like ARM is afraid of RISC-V...
- neolefty 3y agoOr trying to catch up to Apple?
- snvzz 3y agoWei-han Lien (lead architect of M1 at Apple) is the lead architect of Ascalon at Tenstorrent (CEO: Jim Keller). Ascalon is a RISC-V microarchitecture expected to be released in 2024, with similar performance to projected AMD Zen5 (also 2024), but lower power consumption. If ARM is still trying to catch up to Apple, they'll be leapfrogged by RISC-V, as early as that.
- manuelabeledo 3y agoThis is pure speculation. ARM has very successful architectures and cores already in the market. The current iteration of the Snapdragon 8cx does a pretty good job in general purpose computing scenarios [0]. There are no RISC-V cores in the market to compete with it. Vendors can and will promise breakthroughs every now and then, that is just how marketing works. It happened before with things like Graviton, and of course Tenstorrent is doing it now. [0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/SD-8cx-Gen-3-vs-M1-vs-M2_14600_12937_14521.247596.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/SD-8cx-Gen-3-vs-M1-vs-M2_14600...
- snvzz 3y ago>There are no RISC-V cores in the market to compete with it. Depends on what "it" is. For the whole Cortex-M line and A53/A55, SiFive has had designs with better power-performance-area for years now. For the higher performance A70 line, SiFive has better designs competing up to A76. There's several other vendors, with their own competitive RISC-V cores. >This is pure speculation. Not when it's based in announcements and talks by the relevant companies. >It happened before with things like Graviton, and of course Tenstorrent is doing it now Wait, why do you think Tenstorrent will not deliver? Do you actually have anything? I have no reason to believe that strong teams that have successfully delivered competitive microarchitectures in a range of companies won't do it with RISC-V now that they're with Tenstorrent, MIPS, Rivos, Ventana, Qualcomm or any others. Ventana's Veyron and Tenstorrent Ascalon are imminent. The other companies are less public about what they're doing. Any one of these efforts could be delayed or underdeliver. All of them? That seems highly unlikely. RISC-V is inevitable.
- TekMol 3y agoDoes anybody else here feel puzzled by statements like "Up to 40% better performance"? I read it as: The performance for some tasks is 40% better, but for other tasks might be 90% worse. So is that a good thing or a bad thing? Why didn't the author give me the average performance instead?
- MikusR 3y agoOther articles don't use the 40% better performance line
- eviks 3y agoBecause there is no average workflow to get to a single meaningful number And the -90% is very unexpected from the context, so that's a possible, but not a proper reading
- cubefox 3y agoThe "up to" number is mostly a marketing term. It allows for cherry picking: Choose the most impressive gains at some obscure task. It doesn't say anything about the average performance increase. Only a well-known benchmark is interesting.
- dagmx 3y agoMore than cherry picking, it leaves room for liability. You don’t want to say 40% faster and have the tech crowds harping on you because a single benchmark performs at 25% faster. Especially when it comes to silicon lottery, thermal designs etc causing variances “Up to” is a get out of jail free card on liability and pretty much every product will use that unless they’re specifically talking about a singular case.
- hackandthink 3y agoInstructions per clock is more telling. 15% more IPC looks very impressive. "Arm is claiming that, based on its pre-silicon simulation numbers, the Cortex-X4 will deliver a 15% IPC uplift at iso-frequency and iso-bandwidth versus the Cortex-X3 used in last year's flagship Android SoCs" (link above) https://www.anandtech.com/print/18871/arm-unveils-armv92-mobile-architecture-cortex-x4-a720-and-a520-64bit-exclusive https://www.anandtech.com/print/18871/arm-unveils-armv92-mob...
- santoshalper 3y agoI upgrade my phone every other generation or so, say 3-4 years, and I get my kids another generation back or pass down my phone. I cannot remember that last time I noticed something running slowly on an Android phone. I am much more interested int the battery life.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kitsunesoba 3y agoPhones are in decent shape but other ARM devices aren't so lucky. A lot of Android tablets sitting at low-midrange and below have extremely weak CPUs for example, even those costing $200-$300 which was a bit of a shock for me. I have a ~$210 2022 Lenovo tablet that is outperformed handily by 2018 midrange Pixel 3XL, which seems a bit silly.
- qball 3y ago>Phones are in decent shape but other ARM devices aren't so lucky. Yes, but that's because Qualcomm and Samsung are about as incompetent at CPU design as early-2010s AMD was; their products have been 3-4 years behind the leading edge for the past decade. This might change with Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia, but they're still going to take a few years to be comparable with what you can get in a 400-dollar iPhone/iPad and be unavailable in the sub-1000 dollar Android market (just like the Snapdragon 888- whose performance is on par with the 2nd gen iPhone SE- is today).
- eric__cartman 3y agoI would imagine that this translates to lower power consumption when doing the same tasks. Something that would require the CPU in a current phone to work hard for a couple of seconds, like calculating possible routes in Google Maps, being able to be completed in less than one would make a difference. Especially if we do this kinds of tasks thousands of times throughout the day. Sadly this will probably mean some apps will be able to steal more CPU time for doing telemetry and serving ads because the user won't notice a difference in response time and performance.
- linderek 3y agoAny idea how m1300 amd is compared to h100?
- investAI 3y agoAny idea how M1300 amd chips will performe vs H100? Is there a DGX equivalent for AMD. Any word from Lisa Su????
- mdasen 3y agoI think my big question is: when? The article notes that the X4 cores are going to use TSMC's N3E process. It looks like N3E is going to follow TSMC's N3 process a year later. The rumors have been that Apple is having trouble getting enough N3 capacity out of TSMC. Despite N3E being scheduled after N3, it's possible that it isn't just a linear thing and there's a certain amount of independence in the development. However, it seems like TSMC might not be ready for the X4 cores for a while.
- wmf 3y agoI would expect SoCs using these cores to be announced at the end of this year and ship early next year.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoThat would mean manufacturing no later than end of year this year and prototyping runs coming soon, which seems aggressive.
- my123 3y agoIt's what is done every single year. By the time this announcement happened, the chips already came back from the fab since a bit.
- mdasen 3y agoI think in a normal year, wmf might be right. However, I'm inclined to agree with you that it seems aggressive. TSMC's roadmap had N3E landing a year after N3. If the rumors of supply struggles with N3 for this fall are right, it would seem like N3E might be a stretch for Fall 2024. Maybe rumors of TSMC's N3 troubles have been exaggerated. Still, it seems unlikely that Spring 2024 will see X4 cores. It seems like there's a decent likelihood that Qualcomm will push back their Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 by 6 months to get the X4 cores (or create a Gen 3 with smaller enhancements). If TSMC's N3 is ready for Fall 2023 and N3E is a year behind that, we aren't going to see X4 cores until Fall 2024. It sounds like ARM is targeting a TSMC process that's farther out than normal - or at least seems farther out based on the information TSMC has given to the public.
- why_only_15 3y ago> Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Google all use Arm's designs and technology as a foundation for their own processor chips that power essentially all of today's phones My understanding was that Amazon/Qualcomm/Mediatek/Google use ARM's cores but that Apple had their own core design and just uses the ARM architecture under special license.
- dagmx 3y agoYep, though both Samsung and Qualcomm have tried custom cores in the past. Today Apple’s really the only major player doing their own core designs.
- andromeduck 3y agoFor compute, yeah - but Id be extremely surprised if there weren't half a dozen Cortex R or M cores lurking in the uncore. I'd also be surprised if they used custom cores for smaller chips like for airpods/airtags.
- float4 3y ago> I'd also be surprised if they used custom cores for smaller chips like for airpods/airtags. AirTags have an nRF52xxx SoC by Nordic. The only Apple silicon in them is the U1 UWB chip (which is also present in iPhone, HomePod, Watch, ...) which runs on a 16nm Cortex M4. Recent AirPods run on H1 / H2 SoCs though, which are custom Apple chips. Wouldn't be surprised if they are built around the E-cores from the iPhone SoC.
- rawoke083600 3y agoWill these make it to the Lenovo Carbon X1s ?
- CoolCold 3y agoProbably in next next x13s
- adrian_b 3y agoIt is very good that they have also introduced a new little core, Cortex-A520. This differs from what happened during the last decade when Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A55 have been the only little cores implementing respectively Armv8.0-A and Armv8.2-A, while new big or medium-size cores were being introduced each year. This is good, because, as I have seen just yesterday at a link provided by someone here on HN, a set of measurements made on many smartphones has shown very convincingly that unlike Cortex-X2, which was indeed better than Cortex-X1, both Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510 have regressed a lot in power efficiency in comparison with the older Cortex-A78 and Cortex-A55, when made with the same manufacturing process, despite the contrary claims made in the presentations of the Arm company. Replacing Cortex-A510 looks like an admission that it sucked. Hopefully Cortex-A520 and Cortex-A720 are the first decent implementations of low-power Arm cores with SVE2, the first that are truly better than the old cores with Armv8.2-A. EDIT: Going through all the presentation slides at AnandTech shows that they have bumped the implemented architecture to Armv9.2-A. This would have required a new little core anyway. Nevertheless, they have reverted some of the microarchitectural changes originally made between Cortex-A55 and Cortex-A510, so it is likely that the introduction of a new little core has been driven both by the desire of implementing the additional features of Armv9.2-A and by the need of achieving acceptable power efficiency.
- rayiner 3y agoIt’s interesting that this is a 10-wide design at the dispatch stage, up from 6/8-wide in the X3. My understanding was that increasing dispatch width had super-linear complexity (specifically quadratic increase in stall and bypass logic). It seems like it took decades to go from 3-wide to 4-wide designs, and then suddenly 6-10 wide designs all started popping up since 2018. Does anyone know whether there has been some fundamental advances in circuit design to enable that?
- bullen 3y agoI think this is close to fraud, they should be required to state the performance per Watt. 40% performance gain is ZERO if you have to feed it 40% more electricity.
- bullen 3y ago[flagged]