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Assuming it is some "at reset" selection, Nvidia advertising it as an eight-core chip would be deceptive, so I'm reluctant to believe such a theory. I wouldn't
by colejohnson66 3y ago
Assuming it is some "at reset" selection, Nvidia advertising it as an eight-core chip would be deceptive, so I'm reluctant to believe such a theory. I wouldn't put it past marketing to do such a thing, but later revisions of the manual don't mention the A53 cores, so I'm inclined to believe it's a hardware bug.
Unfortunately, without someone from inside Nvidia telling us, all we have are rumors and no evidence.
- toast0 3y agoARM big.LITTLE systems started out as use one or the other, but not both simultaneously. Advertising those as 8 core when it's really big 4 or LITTLE 4, or later incantations where you could use the big or LITTLE of each of the four paired processors, is sketchy, but was common. If the plan was to allow big 4 or LITTLE 4, and then a hardware bug became apparent that you could switch to LITTLE cores but not back to big cores, well you notify customers and stop advertising the LITTLE cores. archive.org has them mentioned Jun 1 2016 [1], and then removed Jun 14, 2016 [2]; the A53 cores aren't mentioned but are shown in the die map on the current page [3]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160601063237/http://www.nvidia.com:80/object/tegra-x1-processor.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160601063237/http://www.nvidia... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160614200203/http://www.nvidia.com:80/object/tegra-x1-processor.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160614200203/http://www.nvidia... [3] https://developer.nvidia.com/content/tegra-x1 https://developer.nvidia.com/content/tegra-x1