ARM announces Cortex-A50 series

Well the Cortex-A7 used as reference is also 1.6Ghz which is the absolute maximum anyone is shipping it as far as I'm aware, typically it's clocked below that. So seeing it reaching 25% higher clock on some "advanced process node" (probably some 20nm node) isn't that surprising, and typical clocks might well be lower.

Well I subtract some marketing (that is I look at the lowest result...) and arrive at more like a factor of 1.3x.

I'd say it's a an improved and ARMv8 version of the A7 . Still with that kind of IPC increase it would be somewhat close to Cortex-A9 in IPC (well at least if compared against the earlier revisions) which would be quite astonishing for a "simple" in-order design.

 

arm64 was coming obviously, but Apple switched to arm64 before hitting the 4gb limit, that's something.

They put out 2 different microarchitectures targeting 2 different ISAs (almost) in 2 years. Even Intel doesn't do that, that's something.

The press obviously doesn't know what it is talking about, but Apple's silicon capabilities are amazing.

 

Where's the hypocrisy? They need something to write about. Most other stuff was as expected before the presentation. 64-bit was a total surprise to everyone of us. It is a big deal, even if only from a pure technical point of view and not necessarily in practice.