ARM Cortex-A72 preview: the successor to A57 coming on phones in 2016
ARM has recently lifted the cover off the Cortex-A72, its second-generation 64-bit processor aimed to succeed the A57 performance core and take its place in big.LITTLE configurations as the big core.
The Cortex-A72 comes with some huge promises by ARM: the company promises that the A72 will deliver up to 3.5 times the performance of the Cortex-A15 on smartphones, and that it will feature ‘breakthrough energy efficiency’. Those are some brave claims for a core that is expected to arrive on real-world devices towards the end of 2016, some 18 months from now. Let’s explore all these claims in a bit more depth and see whether all is as rosy as headlines would have you believe.
Cortex A72: to be manufactured on 16nm FinFET+
When you see ARM’s bar charts with the Cortex-A72 towering over the performance-driven Cortex-A57 (which is expected to ship on flagships like the Galaxy S6 and HTC One (M9) soon) and the Cortex-A15, you’d be forgiven to not pay closer attention to the fact that ARM is comparing apples to oranges here. That is, we have different manufacturing nodes: the exact comparison puts Cortex-A72 made on a 16nm FinFET process vs Cortex-A57 made on a 20nm process, and finally - Cortex-A15 made on a 28nm node.
It’s hard to estimate how much of that advertized 3.5 times of a performance difference is due to the simple fact that the switch from 28nm to 16nm amounts to two full processing nodes AND a transition from a planar architecture to FinFET, but one thing is certain: it’s a big part of that gain.
It’s important to remember that TSMC’s 16nm FinFET (currently coming in two varieties, the CLN16FF and FinFET Plus) uses the the back-end-of-line (BEOL) interconnect architecture of the company’s 20nm process, but with FinFET transistors rather than typical planar transistors. In addition to that, recently, TSMC has unveiled a third 16nm process it refers to as ultra-low-power (ULP), which is a strong hint that 16nm will be one of the longer-lasting nodes as was 28nm. Source
The Cortex-A72 comes with some huge promises by ARM: the company promises that the A72 will deliver up to 3.5 times the performance of the Cortex-A15 on smartphones, and that it will feature ‘breakthrough energy efficiency’. Those are some brave claims for a core that is expected to arrive on real-world devices towards the end of 2016, some 18 months from now. Let’s explore all these claims in a bit more depth and see whether all is as rosy as headlines would have you believe.
Cortex A72: to be manufactured on 16nm FinFET+
When you see ARM’s bar charts with the Cortex-A72 towering over the performance-driven Cortex-A57 (which is expected to ship on flagships like the Galaxy S6 and HTC One (M9) soon) and the Cortex-A15, you’d be forgiven to not pay closer attention to the fact that ARM is comparing apples to oranges here. That is, we have different manufacturing nodes: the exact comparison puts Cortex-A72 made on a 16nm FinFET process vs Cortex-A57 made on a 20nm process, and finally - Cortex-A15 made on a 28nm node.
It’s hard to estimate how much of that advertized 3.5 times of a performance difference is due to the simple fact that the switch from 28nm to 16nm amounts to two full processing nodes AND a transition from a planar architecture to FinFET, but one thing is certain: it’s a big part of that gain.
It’s important to remember that TSMC’s 16nm FinFET (currently coming in two varieties, the CLN16FF and FinFET Plus) uses the the back-end-of-line (BEOL) interconnect architecture of the company’s 20nm process, but with FinFET transistors rather than typical planar transistors. In addition to that, recently, TSMC has unveiled a third 16nm process it refers to as ultra-low-power (ULP), which is a strong hint that 16nm will be one of the longer-lasting nodes as was 28nm. Source
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