BIG BIG topic, needs a good bit of room to even announce it completely. These are 3 master pages with multiple sub-pages for each of the items, so expect it to take you an hour just to scan it all good, much less to understand in any depth.
READ the first line of the insert that follows, stop, digest it and read it again. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12785/arm-cortex-a76-cpu-unveiled-7nm-powerhousehttps://www.anandtech.com/show/12834/arm-announces-the-mali-g76-scaling-up-bi...https://www.anandtech.com/show/12835/arm-announces-maliv76-video-processor-pl...Anandtech has come through with the very first in-depth look at the new A76 generation. Above are three large reference posts that will take you a half an hour each just to look at and to go to
all the sub-pages that are listed per topic in a drop down bar that you will find immediately below the main title and above the first graphic.
This is a good example of the use of a mobile phone style drop down bar (and how phone tech handles very complex things in general). This drop down bar leads you in series to 5 different pages of in-depth analysis on each item of the A-76 CPU product generation. The pages 1-5 do build on each other, so please view them in order for the very best learning effect.
Wow. It is a brave new world out there ---- Apple has been implementing and building on this stuff as their A-12 processor and you can see where Apple got a lot of the headline busting stuff they are rolling out right now. It is all predicated on 7nm though, real working at full speed (3 GHZ and up) 2nd gen 7nm lithography, so now you see why Apple was so adamant with TSMC that 2nd generation 7nm had to happen, ASAP.
Apple spent a ton of money and MADE it happen, kudos goes to Apple for that.
And yes, Intel is now toast. Apple will serve them up first with a baked Apple on top unless Qualcomm gets there first with the big sharp-pointed rotisserie skewer. Then the race to make niche specific laptop chipsets rolls over to Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei, ---- and all the rest of the hockey stick boys eventually.
Quick take away ---- it is all drastically better stuff now, main cores are much beefier and faster, graphics are leaping up past television set hi rez levels, and AI & Machine Learning is still going up by multiples of 3-10x yearly. The energy sipping A-55 little cores are still good to go and will continue in use, which is a good thing since a WHOLE BUNCH of 8 core A-55 "littles only" phones had just come out this spring at the older 10 and 12nm lithography levels.
Apple is paying out really big bucks for new 7nm lithography lines that everyone else gets to use in the 3rd year as TSMC will then own them. Apple is still playing leapfrog with all the others every other year, but the others do play catch up a year later and Apple has to leapfrog again just to stay firmly ahead.
TSMC and Apple have built the 5nm lithography building now and the utilities are in place with the first trial 5nm production line partially installed now, so the next leapfrog jump is being readied for 2020.
Intel is utterly,
completely frozen in place, totally stuck in the x86 ice sheet. Intel isn't going anywhere .....
ARM will simply step around Intel and keep on going at the same developmental pace (two 30-40% improvements annually, one in spring, one in fall with a lithography generation change-up coming every two years).
Samsung and Huawei are now getting ready to duke it out again for the #2 and #3 slot while Microsoft and Qualcomm are still trying to make up a fully functional marriage over in laptop/PC space.
AMD is still picking up all the little Intel rot dribbles that are on the ground all over the place, Distasteful work that, but AMD is still doing well and is incorporating all the new ARM tech that Intel simply won't stoop to use.
Google is technically out front developmentally at the moment, but Google lacks all the lying and cheating and conniving "marketing skills" to commercialize on this progress and firm up the developmental lead they currently have.
How long will it be before the new ARM SoC designs performance equals the Core i3 and Core i5 throughput and graphics levels ??? (look at your wrist watch, subtract a few hours and you got your answer)==================================================
This last nugget is aimed directly at Intel and keynotes what is wrong with Intel right now. Product density and efficiency -- in the same motherboard area that a competitor has to have to use their
smallest non-graphics equipped, no radio on board, non-battery-efficient non-SoC processor, in that same space three (3)
complete 8 core A-76 SoCs could fit in that same motherboard real estate complete with PoP memory, radio, CPUs, GPUs VPU and EVERYTHING a phone or a laptop needs to actually be productive.
3 of them. Each of the three A76 SoCs would run on less than half the power consumed by the one much larger competitor processor -- one that still completely lacks both a functional graphics functionality and a cellular radio functionality. The competitor's set-up would still require additional chips worth of motherboard space for these functions. That runs the total equivalent area used on the competitors motherboard up to
4 times more area and
three-four times the power budget of the A-76 SoC just to run all the extra chips the competitor actually requires (and at double the voltage required by the A-76 SoC).
The competitor's inability to use PoP packages (stacking memory on top of the SoC package as is commonly used in the ARM world) further aggravates these same area issues as all his components are "oversized" as well.
Note: the competitor's radio and base band chipset by itself is almost exactly the same size as the ENTIRE A-76 SoC package.Compared to this competitor and all of his required extra chips, an ARM A-76 SoC has twice the processing power at a quarter of the motherboard area that the competitive processor (and the required extra chips) has to have AND the A-76 SoC would run off 1/2 the voltage and 1/4 the total power budget that the competitor would require to run all his extra chips.
Cost --- all this extra silicone costs extra money and the "extra voltage" requires a lot of additional battery cells and a lot of extra watt/hours of charging time that also costs a lot of extra money.
This competitor typically has had to subsidize any product that is actually sold in direct competition to ARM processor equipped products. This money came originally from laptops and desktop and server class chipset sales, but now ARM is moving into those same markets as well, so now the competitor is now unable to recoup his subsidy losses.
Wall Street wants the net loss subsidies to stop, business that needs them long term should be abandoned rather than dragged out long term.