Items tagged with Big.Little
AMD has filed a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) describing a hybrid processor architecture that is drawing parallels to ARM's big.LITTLE design philosophy. They are very different architectures, but the concept of pairing more powerful cores for heavy lifting with power efficient cores for less intensive chores is somewhat similar. This type of approach works well in the mobile space where battery life considerations factor into the equation. AMD acknowledges this in its patent application. "Increasing battery life is important to users of mobile devices that operate on battery power, sometimes for extended periods of time. Accordingly, there is a need for efficient,...
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ARM’s Cortex-A57 is just now starting to break stride with design wins and full-ramp production in new mobile products. However, today ARM is releasing a wealth of information on its successor: the Cortex-A72. ARM is targeting a core clock of 2.5GHz for the Cortex-A72 and it will be built using a 14nm/16nm FinFET+ process. Using the Cortex-A15 (NVIDIA Tegra 4, Tegra K1) as a baseline, ARM says that the Cortex-A57 (Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, Samsung Exynos 5433) offers 1.9x the performance. Stepping up to the Cortex-A72, which will begin shipping in next year’s flagship smartphones, offers 3.5x the baseline performance of the Cortex-A15. These performance increases are being made within the same...
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Samsung announced the next generation of its Exynos processors with the Exynos 5 Octa 5420 chip, which boasts even more CPU and graphics processing power than previous editions. In fact, Samsung says that the new chip offers 20% better CPU processing and double the graphics firepower of any other Exynos 5 Octa. The Exynos 5 Octa uses four ARM Cortex-A15 (1.8GHz) and four Cortex-A7 (1.3GHz) processors in a big.LITTLE setup as well as ARM Mali-T628 MP6 graphics. It also features 14.9GBps memory bandwidth and 933MHz dual-channel LPDDR3 and supports 1080p HD video recording and playback at 60 FPS. And of course, power efficiency is at the forefront of the design. "Demand for richer graphic experiences...
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big.LITTLE is ARM's solution to a particularly nasty problem: New process nodes no longer deliver the kind of overall power consumption improvements that they did prior to 2005. Prior to 90nm, semiconductor firms could count on new chips being smaller, faster, and drawing less power at a given frequency. Eight years ago, that stopped being true. Tighter process geometries still pack more transistors per square millimeter, but the improvements to power consumption and maximum frequency have been falling every single node. Rising defect densities have already created a situation where -- for the first time ever -- 20nm chips won't be cheaper than the 28nm processors they're supposed to replace....
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In Part I of this series, we discussed ARM's business model and how it works with its various partners as compared to Intel. Today, we're diving into a specific technology that ARM believes will allow it to differentiate its products and offer superior performance to Santa Clara and the upcoming 22nm Bay Trail. big.LITTLE is ARM's solution to a particularly nasty problem: New process nodes no longer deliver the kind of overall power consumption improvements that they did prior to 2005. Prior to 90nm, semiconductor firms could count on new chips being smaller, faster, and drawing less power at a given frequency. Eight years ago, that stopped being true. Tighter process geometries still pack more...
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Samsung is about to raise the stakes in the smartphone wars as it gets ready to detail the first mobile applications processor built around ARM's big.LITTLE architecture. Big.LITTLE is essentially an expansion of the "4-Plus-1" core technology used in NVIDIA's ARM-based Tegra 3 SoC, which is designed to deliver quad-core performance when needed and battery-saving single-core performance the rest of the time. According to EETimes, Samsung plans to talk about an upcoming 8-core chip at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February. Clearly based on ARM's big.LITTLE concept, Samsung's chip will be a 28nm SoC with a pair of quad-core clusters. One of those clusters is clocked at 1.8GHz,...
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