Arm's New Cortex-A77 CPU Micro-architecture: Evolving Performance

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2018 was an exciting year for Arm’s own CPU designs. Last year in May we saw the release of the Cortex-A76 and the subsequent resulting silicon in the form of the Kirin 980 as well as Snapdragon 855 SoCs. We were very impressed by the IP, and Arm managed to deliver on all its performance, efficiency and area promises, resulting in some excellent SoCs and devices powering most of 2019’s flagship devices.

This year we follow-up with another TechDay disclosure, and this time around we’re uncovering Arm’s follow-up to the Cortex-A76: the new Cortex-A77. The new generation is a direct evolution of last year’s major microarchitecture introduction, and represents the second instance of Arm’s brand-new Austin core family. Today we’ll analyse how Arm has pushed the IPC of its new microarchitecture and how this will translate into real performance for upcoming late-2019/early-2020 SoCs and devices.

Deimos turns to Cortex-A77

The announcement of the Cortex-A77 doesn’t come as a surprise as Arm continues on their traditional annual IP release cadence. In fact today is not the first time that Arm has talked about the A77: In August of last year Arm had teased the CPU core when releasing its performance roadmap through 2020:

Codenamed as “Deimos”, the new Cortex-A77 picks up where the Cortex-A76 left off and follows Arm’s projected trajectory of delivering a continued solid 20-25% CAGR of performance uplift with each generation of Arm’s new Austin family of CPUs.

Before we dwell into the new Cortex-A77, we should take a look back at how the performance of the A76 has evolved for Arm:

The A76 has certainly been a hugely successful core for Arm and its licensees. The combination of the brand-new microarchitecture alongside the major improvements that the 7nm TSMC process node has brought some of the biggest performance and efficiency jumps we’ve ever seen in the industry.

The results is that the Kirin 980 as well as the Snapdragon 855 both represented major jumps over their predecessors. Qualcomm has proclaimed a 45% leap in CPU performance compared to the previous generation Snapdragon 855 with Cortex-A75 cores, the biggest generational leap ever.

While the performance increase was notable, the energy efficiency gains we saw this generation was even more impressive and directly resulted in improved battery life of devices powered by the new Kirin and Snapdragon SoCS.

While the A76 performed well, we should remember that it does have competition. While Samsung’s own microarchitecture this year with the M4 has lessened the performance/efficiency gap, the Exynos CPU still largely lags behind by a generation, even though this difference is amplified by a process node difference this year (8nm vs 7nm). The real competition for Arm here lies with Apple’s CPU design teams: Currently the A11 and A12 still hold a large performance and efficiency lead that amounts to roughly two microarchitecture generations.

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