ARM announces Cortex-A50 series

[mczak]

It's very interesting that they were targeting the A53 at 2GHz, which might be a indicator of the clocks which manufacturers will be using on their SoCs.

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.

So they state an about 1.4x performance increase per clock if you normalize their frequencies.

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

In general they were also talking how the A53 will be a bigger improvement in performance, noting that it's not just an ARMv8 version of the A7.

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.

 

[rpg.314]

The point is, we all knew that ARM processors would have to eventually use 64bit registers, at least because of the 4GB RAM limit. That much was obvious and it was always a matter of when rather than if.
ARM announced that transition as early as 2011 with the first details about armv8, the first cores with armv8 were announced a year ago (as you see in the first post) and by then, no one seemed surprised about it.

Get to Q32013, apple says their newest SoC is 64bit and suddenly all the "«tech press»" starts saying apple made another genius move and technical marvel and how important 64bit ARM cpus are for the future of mankind.

Oh well, just "«tech press»" being "«tech»" press.

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.

 

[silent_guy]

I criticized the tech press and their blatant hipocritical weight on the 64bit feature.

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.