There is no dedicated thread to discuss ARM CPU cores and CPU and SOC related efforts, it may not be worse it to to create one on a per IP basic so a single topic may do.
Now into the subject of ARM last announcement, I found ARM last effort "dynamIQ" quite interesting. Big-Little has issue mainly it forces OEM to implement 2 separate share of L2. the low power cores have also acces to a lot cache than the performance optimized cluster. Put shortly it wa nie bu a little ugly.
Now Dynamic IQ sound pretty great, somehow I see it as a twisted form of multithreading. Intel and AMD both have big cores with SMT, those cores are complex and extremely costly to develop, the also remain power hungry (compared to most Arm cores). Long story short it may not be the right approach for ARM, their bigger coresare not big enough to justify the implementation of SMT to maximise the CPU ressources utilization.
The A35 cores are really tiny and nowaday silicon is relatively cheap, adding them to a A72/73 (or what is next) cluster is definitely cheap.
So Dynamic IQ looks a lot like to me like ARM take on SMT actually more on assymmetric multi-threading.
Anyway the thing look like a step forward from the multi-clusters approach, ARM partnerr should be in a position to provide SOC with real world performance closer to Intel/AMD (laptop and tinier) could prove useful is MSFT release Windows to ARM platform again.
Now into the subject of ARM last announcement, I found ARM last effort "dynamIQ" quite interesting. Big-Little has issue mainly it forces OEM to implement 2 separate share of L2. the low power cores have also acces to a lot cache than the performance optimized cluster. Put shortly it wa nie bu a little ugly.
Now Dynamic IQ sound pretty great, somehow I see it as a twisted form of multithreading. Intel and AMD both have big cores with SMT, those cores are complex and extremely costly to develop, the also remain power hungry (compared to most Arm cores). Long story short it may not be the right approach for ARM, their bigger coresare not big enough to justify the implementation of SMT to maximise the CPU ressources utilization.
The A35 cores are really tiny and nowaday silicon is relatively cheap, adding them to a A72/73 (or what is next) cluster is definitely cheap.
So Dynamic IQ looks a lot like to me like ARM take on SMT actually more on assymmetric multi-threading.
It reminds me of the 360 era and its sucky cpu cores and of the story of developers toying with main thread and helper thread when the cores did not offer much resources to share to begin with.
