Not in the Kirin chips. HiSilicon have custom CPU cores they're using in their server SoCs, the TSV110 core claims to be comparable to the A76 in performance and they're using it in their Kunpeng 920 64-core chip.
What about the Kirin A1 chip used in the new Huawei GT2 watch? That seems a good use-case for custom chips due to the severe power constraints and custom OS.
It's a huge shame too. Those cores were hugely power efficient, but their corporate board forced them to shut the CPU division down because "the benchmarks weren't there" for sheer performance. Despite the fact they you could get far better battery life with them than ARMs design. Then all of a sudden people start complaining about short battery life as soon as this happens. Shows what you get when tech decisions are made by ignorant dullards.
Maybe he's referencing custom Android kernels with scheduler tweaks and undervolted CPUs.
I haven't been keeping up with Samsung specifically (as I wouldn't touch their phones with a 10 foot pole...), but a couple of previous Android SoCs have been clocked kinda hot, or had a considerable amount of voltage headroom. In other words, it's possible that Mongoose is like some of AMD's recent desktop GPUs, where you can get a massive reduction in power from a small underclock and some pstate tweaking.
I don't expect Ampere to last too long. It looks like interest in ARM server chips has fallen again since AMD has come out with x86 alternatives to Intel. In the areas where ARM server chips have the best chance of succeeding in the near term, Marvell has a competitive advantage because they are well-established in the storage and network spaces.
As far as NVIDIA is concerned, I am not predicting this will happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if they released their own ARM server chips in some capacity. They recently adapted many of their CUDA libraries to ARM to target 5G network servers that use their GPUs (competing with CPUs and FPGAs), and if that is successful and if their buy-out of Mellanox goes through then they will have the technology and market position where it might make sense for them to come out with a lightweight ARM CPU, without much focus on the usual vector instructions, closely integrated with their GPUs to carry out the functions of those 5G servers. Strategically, it would give them a jumping-off point to market ARM CPUs for HPC if they are disappointed with IBM's HPC efforts and if Intel and AMD are able to successfully encourage people to use their GPUs with their respective CPUs.
No, they will still be making Exynos SoC's -- just using off the shelf or slightly modified ARM cores like Qualcomm does instead of their own 100% custom M series cores.
"M6 was an SMT microarchitecture, which frankly quite perplexed me as a mobile targeted CPU – I definitely would have wanted to see how that would have played out, just from an academic standpoint."
SMT makes a lot of sense on any wide microarchitecture as many ALUs are not fully utilized even with expensive OoO. I suspect that a wide core without speculative OoO (no speculative execution beyond conditional branch instructions) with SMT would be the most power-efficient design.
It doesn't make sense in mobile designs as idle execution units would be preferably clock gated instead of having wasteful overhead logic to enable SMT. Arm has said that they have no plans of ever adopting SMT in any energy efficient oriented design as it's simply counterproductive.
Interesting take on an in-order wide SMT core, but that would likely just be something useful for a small core as ST performance would be too bad as a main core. Even the Cortex-A65 will remain datacenter centric with no plans for mobile.
You are correct that idle units would be clock and/or power gated. However, leveraging SMT has to be weighed against waking up the front end of the core that would otherwise be idle. Basically it is waking up unused execution units vs. waking up an idle core. SMT would be beneficial if the front end can be shared efficiently (large micro-op caches etc.) with the big power delta coming from the execution units. How many free execution units and how well a front end can be shared is of course dependent upon implementation so any (dis)advantage to SMT is not clear cut. Most designs have chosen the big.little approach but I would not say that that is the definitive answer without seeing the raw power consumption numbers from implementations.
I wonder how much physical die space SMT would add to a little ARM core. Low priority/background Android tasks seem to be well threaded, hence every new design seems to add even more little cores.
I am currently using a Galaxy S7 device with the first custom core, the exynos m1. It is a pretty good chip still, fast for everyday stuff, average to good in terms of battery life. It can still run emulators at full speed like PPSSPP or dolphin (not all games). Thermals are quite good and to be honest, even though the newer phones do feel a bit snappier, I will keep using this phone as much as possible since the size/weight is perfect for me.
I think this is a bit of a shame. For the rest of the mobile ARM environment to catch up to Apple's designs in performance someone probably needed to push for a bigger, wider core.
Although I don't think that any of the Samsung designed M cores ever lived up to expectations, I feel that at least a good chunk of that had to do with the implementation and not the cores themselves.
The high level impression I remember from Andrei's Deep Dives was that they always targeted too high of a final clock speed - forcing voltages past the point of absurdity, and they had BSP and scheduler issues.
Bigger and wider cores are fine, but only if they can get the performance out of it to justify that. When they're at ~3x larger in area and double in power against Arm, but can get only at most ~5% more performance except for some cherry picked microbenchmarks and broken memory component tests, then the tradeoffs don't make sense.
It's a sad state. Someone like Samsung could afford to go Apple, but they didn't manage due to whatever issues they had. I liked the Cortex based designs (Galaxy S2 user here) and ARM has really knocked it out of the park swith A76 and hopefully onward.
That's the really surprising thing. If ANYONE could go with custom CPU it should be Samsung since they could feed all their internal divisions from TV to cellphone to laptop. Bizarre turnaround. I wonder if its political or something.
They probably just couldn’t do what they wanted to. They never had a big SoC business for third parties, mostly foundry work. When Apple left, according to reports, that was over 40% of their SoC production, and the top end of it too.
Yes, SoCs that performed about the same as everyone else’s. Back then, no ARM SoC performed well, and battery life wasn’t so good either. That’s why Apple decided to go their own way. And back then Apple and Samsung were friendlier. But Apple decided that Samsung could no longer provide what they needed for their ambitious future needs. Nobody could. They could have gone to Qualcomm.
They did the right thing though and made their own.
This closing was logical from a business POV, but is bad news for the mobile space: it's now ARM vs. Apple, and that leaves all non-Apple/iOS phones with just one vendor that truly develops new cores - ARM. Now, I believe they're doing quite well in keeping the pace up, but competition tends to keep market leaders on their toes. Best example was Intel in the desktop and server space. Pretty stagnant for several years, then, once AMD finally launched Zen, Chipzilla got a move on.
Good decision. Better focus their effort on NPU, DSP, GPU, MODEM or other areas where its easier (and more useful) to differentiate itself from their competitors.
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Marlin1975 - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
Always seemed like they were 1 design behind most others.But sad to see a competitor drop out. Competition is always a good thing.
ToTTenTranz - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
Are the Qualcomm Kryo cores considered custom?If not, does this leave nvidia and apple as the only ones who are still making custom ARM cores?
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
Qualcomm hasn't had a custom since the Snapdragon 820 and their server team is also disbanded AFAIK.Apple, HiSilicon, Marvell/Cavium, Ampere and whatever Nvidia is doing would be the last large custom teams.
melgross - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
I thought the HiSilicon cores were pretty much standard ARM.yeeeeman - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
How is hisilicon custom? Kirin chips have minor changes compared to original arm ip.Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
Not in the Kirin chips. HiSilicon have custom CPU cores they're using in their server SoCs, the TSV110 core claims to be comparable to the A76 in performance and they're using it in their Kunpeng 920 64-core chip.vladx - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
What about the Kirin A1 chip used in the new Huawei GT2 watch? That seems a good use-case for custom chips due to the severe power constraints and custom OS.Frenetic Pony - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
It's a huge shame too. Those cores were hugely power efficient, but their corporate board forced them to shut the CPU division down because "the benchmarks weren't there" for sheer performance. Despite the fact they you could get far better battery life with them than ARMs design. Then all of a sudden people start complaining about short battery life as soon as this happens. Shows what you get when tech decisions are made by ignorant dullards.MrSpadge - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14072/the-samsung-g...That's not what I call "far better battery life" of the Samsung SoC.
s.yu - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
I'm curious too, where did you get this?brucethemoose - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
Maybe he's referencing custom Android kernels with scheduler tweaks and undervolted CPUs.I haven't been keeping up with Samsung specifically (as I wouldn't touch their phones with a 10 foot pole...), but a couple of previous Android SoCs have been clocked kinda hot, or had a considerable amount of voltage headroom. In other words, it's possible that Mongoose is like some of AMD's recent desktop GPUs, where you can get a massive reduction in power from a small underclock and some pstate tweaking.
Yojimbo - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
I don't expect Ampere to last too long. It looks like interest in ARM server chips has fallen again since AMD has come out with x86 alternatives to Intel. In the areas where ARM server chips have the best chance of succeeding in the near term, Marvell has a competitive advantage because they are well-established in the storage and network spaces.As far as NVIDIA is concerned, I am not predicting this will happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if they released their own ARM server chips in some capacity. They recently adapted many of their CUDA libraries to ARM to target 5G network servers that use their GPUs (competing with CPUs and FPGAs), and if that is successful and if their buy-out of Mellanox goes through then they will have the technology and market position where it might make sense for them to come out with a lightweight ARM CPU, without much focus on the usual vector instructions, closely integrated with their GPUs to carry out the functions of those 5G servers. Strategically, it would give them a jumping-off point to market ARM CPUs for HPC if they are disappointed with IBM's HPC efforts and if Intel and AMD are able to successfully encourage people to use their GPUs with their respective CPUs.
Rudde - Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - link
Nvidia has Tegra (used in automotive and Nintendo switch), which includes a ARM CpU together with a Nvidia GPU.LiviuTM - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
I think Qualcomm cores are semi-custom ones - they are using Arm cores with some modifications, not the vanilla flavor.Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
In general that doesn't matter much in the context. The modifications are offered and developed by Arm, not the licensee.Teckk - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
Confused here, the entire Exynos lineup is canceled?extide - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
No, they will still be making Exynos SoC's -- just using off the shelf or slightly modified ARM cores like Qualcomm does instead of their own 100% custom M series cores.Ixionuk - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
Suspect they'll still keep making Exynos SoCs just with standard ARM cores rather than custom ones.Teckk - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
Ah, thanks for clarifying! 👍peevee - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
"M6 was an SMT microarchitecture, which frankly quite perplexed me as a mobile targeted CPU – I definitely would have wanted to see how that would have played out, just from an academic standpoint."SMT makes a lot of sense on any wide microarchitecture as many ALUs are not fully utilized even with expensive OoO.
I suspect that a wide core without speculative OoO (no speculative execution beyond conditional branch instructions) with SMT would be the most power-efficient design.
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
It doesn't make sense in mobile designs as idle execution units would be preferably clock gated instead of having wasteful overhead logic to enable SMT. Arm has said that they have no plans of ever adopting SMT in any energy efficient oriented design as it's simply counterproductive.Interesting take on an in-order wide SMT core, but that would likely just be something useful for a small core as ST performance would be too bad as a main core. Even the Cortex-A65 will remain datacenter centric with no plans for mobile.
Kevin G - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
You are correct that idle units would be clock and/or power gated. However, leveraging SMT has to be weighed against waking up the front end of the core that would otherwise be idle. Basically it is waking up unused execution units vs. waking up an idle core. SMT would be beneficial if the front end can be shared efficiently (large micro-op caches etc.) with the big power delta coming from the execution units. How many free execution units and how well a front end can be shared is of course dependent upon implementation so any (dis)advantage to SMT is not clear cut. Most designs have chosen the big.little approach but I would not say that that is the definitive answer without seeing the raw power consumption numbers from implementations.brucethemoose - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
I wonder how much physical die space SMT would add to a little ARM core. Low priority/background Android tasks seem to be well threaded, hence every new design seems to add even more little cores.yeeeeman - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
I am currently using a Galaxy S7 device with the first custom core, the exynos m1. It is a pretty good chip still, fast for everyday stuff, average to good in terms of battery life. It can still run emulators at full speed like PPSSPP or dolphin (not all games). Thermals are quite good and to be honest, even though the newer phones do feel a bit snappier, I will keep using this phone as much as possible since the size/weight is perfect for me.MrCommunistGen - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
I think this is a bit of a shame. For the rest of the mobile ARM environment to catch up to Apple's designs in performance someone probably needed to push for a bigger, wider core.Although I don't think that any of the Samsung designed M cores ever lived up to expectations, I feel that at least a good chunk of that had to do with the implementation and not the cores themselves.
The high level impression I remember from Andrei's Deep Dives was that they always targeted too high of a final clock speed - forcing voltages past the point of absurdity, and they had BSP and scheduler issues.
brucethemoose - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
Yeah, Exynos cores seemed to be held back by weird, relatively arbitrary decisions, like excessively high clock targets or those bizarre schedulers.Not that those are trivial issues to fix... But I too feel like the cores weren't living up to their potential in actual implementations.
anonomouse - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
Bigger and wider cores are fine, but only if they can get the performance out of it to justify that. When they're at ~3x larger in area and double in power against Arm, but can get only at most ~5% more performance except for some cherry picked microbenchmarks and broken memory component tests, then the tradeoffs don't make sense.master381 - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
Would appreciate expanding acronyms on company divisions/terms (SLSI, SARC, ACL). Thanks.Death666Angel - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
SLSI is Samsung LSI, their chip division.SARC is the Samsung Austin R&D Center.
ACL is the San Jose Advanced Computing Lab.
TomWomack - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
I wonder who will pick up the team? There's a big ARM site in Austin already, but I'm not sure where ARM would put another three hundred CPU designersAndrei Frumusanu - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
They'll likely be spread around AMD, Intel, Arm, Apple, IBM as they're all in Austin.Death666Angel - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
It's a sad state. Someone like Samsung could afford to go Apple, but they didn't manage due to whatever issues they had. I liked the Cortex based designs (Galaxy S2 user here) and ARM has really knocked it out of the park swith A76 and hopefully onward.webdoctors - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
That's the really surprising thing. If ANYONE could go with custom CPU it should be Samsung since they could feed all their internal divisions from TV to cellphone to laptop. Bizarre turnaround. I wonder if its political or something.melgross - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
They probably just couldn’t do what they wanted to. They never had a big SoC business for third parties, mostly foundry work. When Apple left, according to reports, that was over 40% of their SoC production, and the top end of it too.vladx - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
Apple only used SoCs from Samsung until iPhone 4 afaikmelgross - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
Yes, SoCs that performed about the same as everyone else’s. Back then, no ARM SoC performed well, and battery life wasn’t so good either. That’s why Apple decided to go their own way. And back then Apple and Samsung were friendlier. But Apple decided that Samsung could no longer provide what they needed for their ambitious future needs. Nobody could. They could have gone to Qualcomm.They did the right thing though and made their own.
Kvaern1 - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
Apple used Samsung as a 2nd foundry as late as the A9 but the chips Samsung produced wasn't on par with TSMC'sdropme - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
It's an interesting move considering Arm is now actively selling its own chips.melgross - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
Which chips are those?eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
This closing was logical from a business POV, but is bad news for the mobile space: it's now ARM vs. Apple, and that leaves all non-Apple/iOS phones with just one vendor that truly develops new cores - ARM. Now, I believe they're doing quite well in keeping the pace up, but competition tends to keep market leaders on their toes. Best example was Intel in the desktop and server space. Pretty stagnant for several years, then, once AMD finally launched Zen, Chipzilla got a move on.NICOXIS - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link
Good decision. Better focus their effort on NPU, DSP, GPU, MODEM or other areas where its easier (and more useful) to differentiate itself from their competitors.ksec - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
Wait a min, where did this ARMv9 development come from?