Arm Delivers on Cortex A76 Promises: What it Means for 2019 Devices

[harlan4096]

In the grand scheme of things, it hasn’t been all that long since we first covered Arm’s announcement of the new Cortex A76 CPU microarchitecture. The new CPU IP was publicly unveiled back on the first of June, and Arm had made big promises in regards to the performance and efficiency improvements of the new core. It’s been a little over 5 months since then, and as we originally predicted, we’ve seen vendors announce as well as ship silicon SoCs with the new CPU.

Last week we published our review of the Huawei Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro – both which contain HiSilicon’s new Kirin 980 chipset. Unfortunately for a lot of our readers which are based in the US, the review won’t be as interesting as the devices won’t be available to them. For this reason I’m writing up a standalone piece focusing more on the results of the new Cortex A76 inside the Kirin 980, and discuss more in detail how I think things will play out in the upcoming generation of competing SoCs.

Verifying Arm’s performance projections

Naturally one of the first things people will be interested in is seeing how the Cortex A76 actually manages to perform in practice. Arm had advertised the Cortex A76 to reach clocks of up to 3GHz, and correspondingly had all of its performance projections presented at this frequency. As I’ve written back in May, the 3GHz frequency was always an overly optimistic target that vendors would not be able to achieve; I said something along 2.5GHz would be a much more realistic figure. The Kirin 980 ended up being released with a final clock speed of 2.6GHz, which was more in line with what I expected.

Full reading: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13614/arm...6-promises