Well with such a big die probably it will get expensive and in the end QC & Apple will hold and significant cost advantage , not to mention TSMC lead. I just hope TSMC will keep up.
I doubt Samsung cares too much, though. QC only sells chips, Apple has to buy fab capacity. Samsung is buying from Samsung. When was the last time an Exynos was seen in anything other than a Samsung product? There was some single board computer a while back that used one.
that assumes that the SoC is a significant proportion of the BoM of a phone. looking at multiple BoM reports on the innterTubes, the SoC comes in, at most, to 10%. so a 10% edge in SoC cost ends up being a 1% edge on the BoM. the CxO class eats that up at lunch.
A $1 saving at Samsung's volume adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars. A 300mm wafer yields about 600 980/855 assuming ~70% yield, and 300 9820 assuming slightly lower yield. That's a $20 per chip disadvantage no matter how you look at it and worth billions of dollars. I doubt any CxO can eat that up at lunch.
Of course, we also have to add in node maturity (8nm is an extension of 10nm, whereas 7nm is a bit more leading edge - more difficult to manufacture), licensing costs (IP isn't cheap), and differences between what TSMC charges others and what it actually costs Samsung to manufacture.
Clearly, paying Qualcomm is such an undesirable task, that Huawai, Samsung, and Apple all have invested billions to move away from Qualcomm.
Huawei's not doing Kirin because Qualcomm's "undesirable", you obviously see Xiaomi's flagships on SD priced more competitively than the Huaweis on the Kirins. Huawei's playing the nationalism card by pretending that piecing together ARM cores equate to creating "China's own SoC", or whatever, and by maintaining that character as the savior of Chinese semiconductors they could win the zealous support of and command a significant premium to brainwashed drones which unfortunately make up a significant portion of the Chinese population. Currently, the single indisputable political correctness in China is jingoism, by comparison the political correctness in the US almost seems lovely.
"Huawei's playing the nationalism card by pretending that piecing together ARM cores equate to creating "China's own SoC", or whatever"
"the savior of Chinese semiconductors"
"win the zealous support of and command a significant premium to brainwashed drones"
I can't miss the heavy dose of subjectivity, bias, and frustration in your comment. They built a very decent SoC that they have full control of. The target was achieved: independence from OC, control over the roadmap and features, etc. This is the purpose of building your own SoC. Samsung spent a crapton of money to build a SoC that barely edges out the default QC offering but they still do it for the above mentioned advantages.
Find another conduit to vent frustration and political views that nobody cares about.
It should be noted Apple's history with ARM began long before the iPhone. In fact, ARM (the company) began as joint venture between Acorn Computers (where it all began), Apple Computers (later Apple Inc) and VLSI Technology:
Plus Apple designed its own core beginning with the A6 (late 2012) using ARMv7 (Swift) and then ARMv8 (Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, Hurricane/Zephyr, Monsoon/Mistral and Vortex/Tempest).
Huawei uses ARM Cortex cores (like A76/A55 in the Kirin 980). Just like Qualcomm in the last couple of years.
Although I am sicken with the overwhelming media manipulations by HuaWei over the Internet. I have to say building up an competitive Soc for flagship mobile phones is not an easy task for today's market. Even though they use ARM's core as building blocks, they still need to overcome a lot of difficulties in engineering to pull this off. And it is very clear from HuaWei's product roadmap, what they want to achieve is way more bigger than what you claimed they did. The experience they got from building the Soc will lay the ground for their upcoming datacenter and cloud computing product. I have to say HuaWei is playing this on a much larger scale and on a different level. I believe if they can execute their plan nicely, they can be a major player not only in networking but computing as well in the next 10 years and has revenue equals Intel, Qualcomm, Nokia and Cisco combined.
No, being dependent on a third party that doesn't have any incentive to give you any say in anything is undesirable. Companies that can afford to (a handful as you can see) fix the issue by internalizing. It's the only way to have control over the product.
It's as I thought the moment I saw the 9820 announced on the 8nm node, but the preliminary numbers still suggest a significant performance gap despite investing in a much larger die.
That's a shame. I am guessing it's because of your less-than-enthusiastic review of the M3 cores in the GS9? I get PR=sales but this is a new low for Samsung.
Huawei tried to silence DxO because DxO's Mate20P score was no higher than P20P, in the end they didn't succeed but they suppressed the announcement for a few months in order to push their units, and they lie or severely twist facts almost every announcement. And a company like this has risen to No.2 in the industry. Just know that the state of the entire industry is worse, not better.
I have question. How good is npu compared to the dual npus in the kirin 980 and the octa core npu in the apple a12? At 1.9 TOPS it sounds weak in comparison to the 5 TOPS of the Apple's a12 npu.
The integration of two A75 seems to be a weird strike against the M4 already. Either the M4 is good enough to be the big core for A55 or it is not. Using 2 additional A75 seems like they went with "not" but couldn't just scrap it. I'm looking forward to Andrei's deep dive. :D
Not necessarily. Likely a cost-saving measure since the M4 cores are so massive, and in last year's 4xM3 design, the cores could never hit maximum voltages simultaneously due to thermals. If they were worried about the performance of the M4 cores they could have gone with a 4xA76 setup. Even the M3 cores can probably outperform an A76 if the scheduler and thermals weren't so terrible.
Well, I'm more thinking about how it should be "BIG.little" and not "HUGE.Big.little". It's weird to have 3 tiers of CPU cores in a product like this, where everyone else has one or two, tops. And if I remember the older deep dive with fixed schedulers correctly, it caught up a bit to the Snapdragon then, but the SD was still faster and less power hungry. And if I remember the Exynos announcement article, I think Andrei said they would need to outperform their announced improvements to come close to this generations Snapdragon. And A76 has been shown to be a massively impressive core, so far. So I don't think you are necessarily correct.
Yeah, the M4's had better be zippy. Three tiers is also interesting: is the workload varied enough that all three of them actually get a lot of use, and do all three types justify their cost?
Also *geez* A55s are tiny. If I were designing an SoC I'd spam some more and say "hey, find ways to use threads and your stuff'll zoom." Probably a good reason I'm not designing SoCs, heh.
Having 8x small cores was a common thing in midrange phones for a while. However, the small in-order cores were just slow in single threaded tasks. Well, not "slow" slow, but not fast.
multi-processor design remains front-of-mind for many, but butts up against the simple fact that they ain't many embarrassingly parallel problems in the real world. phone ain't one of em. and 'running' multiple apps at the same time per processor also ain't the same thing. esp. if the apps overwhelm the processor.
Just did a quick measurement and got M4 ~ 3.65 A75, while A75 ~ 3.45 A55
Those ratios are interestingly close.
An A75 being, in general, somewhere between 2-3x faster than an A55 seems about right. So the 3.5x land grab seems pretty good especially since that accounts for the substantial transition to ooo. OTOG, the M4 can issue and retire 50% (or twice the ints and 1.5 fp) ops than the A76. The GB scores should be close to ideal for keeping those units fed, and you see ~4200 vs 3800 & 3800 vs 3300. Some of the subtests (histogram, aes, pdf) approach 1.5 but not many.
What is that CPU-looking dual core block to the right of the A75's and A55's in the upper-right of the CPU complex? Some kind of secure enclave?
Also the M4's are very area intensive and it looks like they could have fit 2x A76's in the space taken up by 1 M4. If they had gone for just one 1x M4, they'd have plenty of room left over for more cache or more GPU cores where counts more directly scale up performance.
Cache doesn't scale too well though, at least not as linearly as adding another core. The GPU is already massive and I'm sure Samsung is focusing more on the CPU to try to catch up to Apple more than GPU.
I could certainly be wrong, but that dual-core block looks like the NPU to me? In this case the 3 blocks labeled NPU would belong to the mali g76 GPU (they are very close to it in any case, and fwiw the exynos 9810 had 3 very similar looking blocks in a similar position to the mali-g72 main blocks). But I know this doesn't match what was supposedly shown as a die shot of the npu parts earlier (which indeed looked exactly like the (mirrored) parts of those boxes labeled NPU here...)
"Kirin 980 at 74.13mm², the Snapdragon 855 at 73.27mm² and even Apple’s A12 at 83.27mm²" I believe the Kirin and SD855 numbers also factor in the integrated LTE modem ? If yes, then shaving off another ~7mm2-10mm2 for modem from those Kirin/SD numbers brings their Apps area to ~64-66 for an apples to apples (sorry, couldn't help it) with the A12 . Does that mean Kirin and SD are competing for feature parity with A12 with just 80% of A12's silicon ?
It's possible, Apple's cores are usually pretty large. And the manual layout of the blocks is optimized for performance not density (or development cost and time, come to think of it). Or at least this was true in the previous ones, haven't looked that much into the recent SoCs.
This did however bring significant performance advantages historically.
Why are the M4 cores so huge? They are 3+ times as large as the A75 cores. While they are wider their slight speed edge over the A75 cores (at the same clock) does not justify such a large silicon area. I guess M4 cores must still be 2+ times larger than ARM's A76 cores, which are actually faster despite being more narrow. Apple went wider and gained speed at some efficiency loss, however as Samsung went wider they largely lost efficiency and needlessly blew up their silicon footprint. ARM is still the power efficiency king though, and starting with A76 it appears that their ambition is to compete in performance as well.
From Andrei's tests, among the big cores Apple's have the best absolute performance and energy efficiency, however the absolute current draw combined w/ the smaller batteries they use lead to early degradation of those batteries and necessitates the formerly secret software throttling they've implemented. I think the A76 might be the most balanced design for a mobile form factor this generation.
That is a design choice though, Apple could throttle the A12s for lower absolute power usage and still easily beat any Android competitor. Qualcomm said last year basically "what single threaded disadvantage?" when questioned about their poor performance compared to the A11 but then tacitly acknowledged the issue by using a 1+3 design with a souped up A76. They're probably not stating the obvious that ARM designs smaller cores than the massive Apple ones because no one is vertically integrated like Apple so every middle man has to take a cut so we end up with cheaper, smaller cores given to OEMs. If ARM were to make A12 sized designs, the end price for OEMs would go through the roof after Qualcomm and ARM do their markups.
My point is that an A12 sized CPU design is suitable for tablets and laptops but not very compelling for phones due to the current draw and the lack of compelling use cases on phones for raw CPU ALU throughput. Apple doesn't have an integrated modem so they have the luxury of extra die space for their big CPUs as well along with a simpler layout and a cheaper process due to the different foundry feature requirements for fixed function analog signal processing units like the modem; an integrated modem isn't necessarily faster or more energy efficient but there are substantial cost savings to the end user in the cost savings from integration. The stellar single threaded CPU benchmarking numbers make for great marketing but the secret was that it only lasted for as long as your battery could handle the wear. (Any of Apple's recent environmental initiatives are also mainly a virtue signaling marketing gimmick whose actual environmental impact would have been outweighed by simply giving users the options to swap out a battery cheaply rather than forcing an upgrade.)
They're the only OEM that doesn't make it a Herculean task to try to swap out a battery. So while I agree they should make their batteries higher, there hasn't been that much excess battery wear compared to Android devices in reality, as their batteries are warrantied for holding 80% of charge at 2 years. Quite a few of my older Android devices started to shut down on me after a couple years.
If you are saying the A76 is faster based on the previous pre-dive article, the benchmarks provided showed system performance in more realistic benchmarks. Peak CPU performance even on the M3 cores was already higher than the A75s by a good amount (going by SpecInt/Geekbench), the issue was in the abysmal scheduler and DVFS response times. I predict the M4 cores will easily blow away the A76 in raw performance but once again the actual real life system performance will be hampered by scheduler or other quirks.
Certainly not - in the link below we have A76 = 3.5x A55. From this die photo we have A75 = 4x A55, M4 = 13.5x A55. Different processes of course, but A76 is not much larger.
This may not be a like for like comparison though, because the A55s in Kirin/Snapdragon have the L2, whereas these most likely do not - and the L2 is going to a significant fraction of the area for an A55.
That's possible indeed. However the process makes a huge difference. SRAM seems to have terrible density on the 8nm process. Check how large each 1MB L3 slice is in 9820, larger than an A75, but on Kirin 980 a 2MB L3 slice easily fits in a A76...
That’s also a bit tough to say. We know the A76 is for sure larger than an A75 iso-process, and the A76s on the Kirin 980 have 512KB L2s. It’s not quite clear if the A75s on the 9820 have L2s either. From the die photo I suspect that they do not, but even if they do it doesn’t seem like it could be larger than 128KB from the arrangement of obvious macros of different sizes. Also note that the data arrays of the Exynos L3 slices are only about half the area of the entire slice, so that’s not quite the right comparison either as far as sram density.
I should be clear though, none of this is to contest the point that the M4s seem ludicrously large in area for the performance they deliver. With that point, I fully agree. I’d probably ballpark the A76+512KB L2 at roughly being somewhere just a bit north of half the size of the M4 iso-process.
Since Samsung most likely won't answer this directly, we can only speculate.
Using the top-of-the-line A76 would have made the M4 more pointless for starters.
Then translating a design to a process is a significant effort. In some cases ARM will do the work, e.g. for a major node on TSMC. With Samsung 8nm, Samsung would have to do that themselves and they may not want to pay for that with every architecture ARM sells, unless it's the key selling point.
Also Samsung still has to pay per instance licenses for ARM cores and A75 is most likely cheaper than A76, while the A55 (or any secondary cores) costs almost nothing, when you've already paid for the A75.
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zer0hour - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
Looking forward to to the E9820 SoC article Andrei! Reckon it'll be the tech article of this Android phone generation.philehidiot - Monday, March 11, 2019 - link
Aye, I'm looking forward to this one, too.RaduR - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
Well with such a big die probably it will get expensive and in the end QC & Apple will hold and significant cost advantage , not to mention TSMC lead. I just hope TSMC will keep up.Death666Angel - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
I doubt Samsung cares too much, though. QC only sells chips, Apple has to buy fab capacity. Samsung is buying from Samsung. When was the last time an Exynos was seen in anything other than a Samsung product? There was some single board computer a while back that used one.WPX00 - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
A couple Meizu phones, back when they couldn't use Snapdragon.FunBunny2 - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
"significant cost advantage"that assumes that the SoC is a significant proportion of the BoM of a phone. looking at multiple BoM reports on the innterTubes, the SoC comes in, at most, to 10%. so a 10% edge in SoC cost ends up being a 1% edge on the BoM. the CxO class eats that up at lunch.
levizx - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
A $1 saving at Samsung's volume adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars. A 300mm wafer yields about 600 980/855 assuming ~70% yield, and 300 9820 assuming slightly lower yield. That's a $20 per chip disadvantage no matter how you look at it and worth billions of dollars.I doubt any CxO can eat that up at lunch.
jeremyshaw - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
Of course, we also have to add in node maturity (8nm is an extension of 10nm, whereas 7nm is a bit more leading edge - more difficult to manufacture), licensing costs (IP isn't cheap), and differences between what TSMC charges others and what it actually costs Samsung to manufacture.Clearly, paying Qualcomm is such an undesirable task, that Huawai, Samsung, and Apple all have invested billions to move away from Qualcomm.
s.yu - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
Huawei's not doing Kirin because Qualcomm's "undesirable", you obviously see Xiaomi's flagships on SD priced more competitively than the Huaweis on the Kirins. Huawei's playing the nationalism card by pretending that piecing together ARM cores equate to creating "China's own SoC", or whatever, and by maintaining that character as the savior of Chinese semiconductors they could win the zealous support of and command a significant premium to brainwashed drones which unfortunately make up a significant portion of the Chinese population.Currently, the single indisputable political correctness in China is jingoism, by comparison the political correctness in the US almost seems lovely.
close - Monday, March 11, 2019 - link
"Huawei's playing the nationalism card by pretending that piecing together ARM cores equate to creating "China's own SoC", or whatever""the savior of Chinese semiconductors"
"win the zealous support of and command a significant premium to brainwashed drones"
I can't miss the heavy dose of subjectivity, bias, and frustration in your comment. They built a very decent SoC that they have full control of. The target was achieved: independence from OC, control over the roadmap and features, etc. This is the purpose of building your own SoC. Samsung spent a crapton of money to build a SoC that barely edges out the default QC offering but they still do it for the above mentioned advantages.
Find another conduit to vent frustration and political views that nobody cares about.
FunBunny2 - Monday, March 11, 2019 - link
" Huawei's playing the nationalism card by pretending that piecing together ARM cores equate to creating "China's own SoC" "not to be too jingoist, but isn't that what Apple did? and any other 'architecture licensee'?
MykeM - Monday, March 11, 2019 - link
It should be noted Apple's history with ARM began long before the iPhone. In fact, ARM (the company) began as joint venture between Acorn Computers (where it all began), Apple Computers (later Apple Inc) and VLSI Technology:A bit of ARM history:
https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/pr...
Plus Apple designed its own core beginning with the A6 (late 2012) using ARMv7 (Swift) and then ARMv8 (Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, Hurricane/Zephyr, Monsoon/Mistral and Vortex/Tempest).
Huawei uses ARM Cortex cores (like A76/A55 in the Kirin 980). Just like Qualcomm in the last couple of years.
pcslide - Wednesday, March 13, 2019 - link
Although I am sicken with the overwhelming media manipulations by HuaWei over the Internet. I have to say building up an competitive Soc for flagship mobile phones is not an easy task for today's market. Even though they use ARM's core as building blocks, they still need to overcome a lot of difficulties in engineering to pull this off. And it is very clear from HuaWei's product roadmap, what they want to achieve is way more bigger than what you claimed they did. The experience they got from building the Soc will lay the ground for their upcoming datacenter and cloud computing product. I have to say HuaWei is playing this on a much larger scale and on a different level. I believe if they can execute their plan nicely, they can be a major player not only in networking but computing as well in the next 10 years and has revenue equals Intel, Qualcomm, Nokia and Cisco combined.close - Monday, March 11, 2019 - link
No, being dependent on a third party that doesn't have any incentive to give you any say in anything is undesirable. Companies that can afford to (a handful as you can see) fix the issue by internalizing. It's the only way to have control over the product.tuxRoller - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
From techinsights (https://techinsights.com/about-techinsights/overvi... for the exynos9820 the soc/bom≈ 17% (about $70).tuxRoller - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
For reference, the most expensive component is the display @ 86.50, or ≈ 21%.Those two components represent 1/3-2/5 of the bom.
s.yu - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
It's as I thought the moment I saw the 9820 announced on the 8nm node, but the preliminary numbers still suggest a significant performance gap despite investing in a much larger die.Javert89 - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
It will be interesting to see if they release Exynos 9825 with 7nm LPE for Note 10.. Double as much area as competitors is a lotJavert89 - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
It's a lot of GPU cores though.. Wonder if the solution is equivalent or superior to Adreno 640 in efficiency (node size apart)s.yu - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
Highly unlikely, Adrenos have been ahead of Malis(regardless of core count) for many generations.Ahadjisavvas - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
When are you going to release the performance results for this chip?Rudde - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14031/samsung-galax...Ahadjisavvas - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
I've already read that article. I meant the architecture deep dive, like Andrei did last year with the 9810.Ian Cutress - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
We only got our first phone yesterday. Waiting on the second. We don't get early samples like the rest of the industry, Samsung isn't interested.shadowx360 - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
That's a shame. I am guessing it's because of your less-than-enthusiastic review of the M3 cores in the GS9? I get PR=sales but this is a new low for Samsung.s.yu - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
Huawei tried to silence DxO because DxO's Mate20P score was no higher than P20P, in the end they didn't succeed but they suppressed the announcement for a few months in order to push their units, and they lie or severely twist facts almost every announcement. And a company like this has risen to No.2 in the industry.Just know that the state of the entire industry is worse, not better.
close - Monday, March 11, 2019 - link
Please, don't hold back your personal bias against Huawei. You spent 80% of your comment budget on bashing them.And then to give weight to your comment you bring DxO into the equation. Probably the most subjectively useless benchmark and scoring available today.
Ahadjisavvas - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
I have question. How good is npu compared to the dual npus in the kirin 980 and the octa core npu in the apple a12? At 1.9 TOPS it sounds weak in comparison to the 5 TOPS of the Apple's a12 npu.Eris_Floralia - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
This would be an interesting battle between the two SoCs.Looking forward to Andrei's deep dive and fixing the Exynos for Samsung again! /s
blu42 - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
At ~4x the size of a CA75, an M4 must be a tough sell..Death666Angel - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
The integration of two A75 seems to be a weird strike against the M4 already. Either the M4 is good enough to be the big core for A55 or it is not. Using 2 additional A75 seems like they went with "not" but couldn't just scrap it. I'm looking forward to Andrei's deep dive. :Dshadowx360 - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
Not necessarily. Likely a cost-saving measure since the M4 cores are so massive, and in last year's 4xM3 design, the cores could never hit maximum voltages simultaneously due to thermals. If they were worried about the performance of the M4 cores they could have gone with a 4xA76 setup. Even the M3 cores can probably outperform an A76 if the scheduler and thermals weren't so terrible.Death666Angel - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
Well, I'm more thinking about how it should be "BIG.little" and not "HUGE.Big.little". It's weird to have 3 tiers of CPU cores in a product like this, where everyone else has one or two, tops.And if I remember the older deep dive with fixed schedulers correctly, it caught up a bit to the Snapdragon then, but the SD was still faster and less power hungry. And if I remember the Exynos announcement article, I think Andrei said they would need to outperform their announced improvements to come close to this generations Snapdragon. And A76 has been shown to be a massively impressive core, so far. So I don't think you are necessarily correct.
phoenix_rizzen - Monday, March 11, 2019 - link
SD855 has 3 CPU clusters (1+3+4).MediaTek has had 3 CPU clusters for awhile (usually 2+4+4) now. I believe they were the first, although their implementations haven't been that great.
There's another one with 3 CPU clusters as well, but I can't think of it right now. Usually it's 2+2+4 to still give an 8-core CPU.
Unless you mean having 3 different types of CPU cores in a SoC, which doesn't appear to be prevalent in the industry (yet?).
twotwotwo - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
Yeah, the M4's had better be zippy. Three tiers is also interesting: is the workload varied enough that all three of them actually get a lot of use, and do all three types justify their cost?Also *geez* A55s are tiny. If I were designing an SoC I'd spam some more and say "hey, find ways to use threads and your stuff'll zoom." Probably a good reason I'm not designing SoCs, heh.
jeremyshaw - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
Having 8x small cores was a common thing in midrange phones for a while. However, the small in-order cores were just slow in single threaded tasks. Well, not "slow" slow, but not fast.twotwotwo - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
Yep, imagining still 1-2 large cores but a lot of small. And just random spitballing anyway, really.FunBunny2 - Monday, March 11, 2019 - link
"Having 8x small cores"multi-processor design remains front-of-mind for many, but butts up against the simple fact that they ain't many embarrassingly parallel problems in the real world. phone ain't one of em. and 'running' multiple apps at the same time per processor also ain't the same thing. esp. if the apps overwhelm the processor.
tuxRoller - Monday, March 11, 2019 - link
Just did a quick measurement and got M4 ~ 3.65 A75, while A75 ~ 3.45 A55Those ratios are interestingly close.
An A75 being, in general, somewhere between 2-3x faster than an A55 seems about right. So the 3.5x land grab seems pretty good especially since that accounts for the substantial transition to ooo.
OTOG, the M4 can issue and retire 50% (or twice the ints and 1.5 fp) ops than the A76. The GB scores should be close to ideal for keeping those units fed, and you see ~4200 vs 3800 & 3800 vs 3300.
Some of the subtests (histogram, aes, pdf) approach 1.5 but not many.
Dodozoid - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
Do you have the S10+ with snapdragon aswel or have you decided to source different snapdragon device?Andrei Frumusanu - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
I don't have it yet, but I will get it.Dodozoid - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
Cool, so this time around, there will be direct comparison of the SoCs. Looking forward to full review.Thank you.
ONGEFF - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
9820 vs 855....dudedud - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
So how big is this M4 compared to Vortex (A12) and A76?Raqia - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
What is that CPU-looking dual core block to the right of the A75's and A55's in the upper-right of the CPU complex? Some kind of secure enclave?Also the M4's are very area intensive and it looks like they could have fit 2x A76's in the space taken up by 1 M4. If they had gone for just one 1x M4, they'd have plenty of room left over for more cache or more GPU cores where counts more directly scale up performance.
shadowx360 - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
Cache doesn't scale too well though, at least not as linearly as adding another core. The GPU is already massive and I'm sure Samsung is focusing more on the CPU to try to catch up to Apple more than GPU.mczak - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
I could certainly be wrong, but that dual-core block looks like the NPU to me? In this case the 3 blocks labeled NPU would belong to the mali g76 GPU (they are very close to it in any case, and fwiw the exynos 9810 had 3 very similar looking blocks in a similar position to the mali-g72 main blocks).But I know this doesn't match what was supposedly shown as a die shot of the npu parts earlier (which indeed looked exactly like the (mirrored) parts of those boxes labeled NPU here...)
Andrei Frumusanu - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
The NPU is what I labelled, this was already directly confirmed by Samsung at ISSCC.gpaok - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
I agree int hat it matches ISSCC - SS last year announced a VPU. Could it be some evolution of that made into a dual core?anonomouse - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
Possibly memory controller logic and perhaps some amount of system cachemooremealymouthed - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
"Kirin 980 at 74.13mm², the Snapdragon 855 at 73.27mm² and even Apple’s A12 at 83.27mm²"I believe the Kirin and SD855 numbers also factor in the integrated LTE modem ? If yes, then shaving off another ~7mm2-10mm2 for modem from those Kirin/SD numbers brings their Apps area to ~64-66 for an apples to apples (sorry, couldn't help it) with the A12 .
Does that mean Kirin and SD are competing for feature parity with A12 with just 80% of A12's silicon ?
close - Monday, March 11, 2019 - link
It's possible, Apple's cores are usually pretty large. And the manual layout of the blocks is optimized for performance not density (or development cost and time, come to think of it). Or at least this was true in the previous ones, haven't looked that much into the recent SoCs.This did however bring significant performance advantages historically.
Santoval - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
Why are the M4 cores so huge? They are 3+ times as large as the A75 cores. While they are wider their slight speed edge over the A75 cores (at the same clock) does not justify such a large silicon area.I guess M4 cores must still be 2+ times larger than ARM's A76 cores, which are actually faster despite being more narrow. Apple went wider and gained speed at some efficiency loss, however as Samsung went wider they largely lost efficiency and needlessly blew up their silicon footprint. ARM is still the power efficiency king though, and starting with A76 it appears that their ambition is to compete in performance as well.
Raqia - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
From Andrei's tests, among the big cores Apple's have the best absolute performance and energy efficiency, however the absolute current draw combined w/ the smaller batteries they use lead to early degradation of those batteries and necessitates the formerly secret software throttling they've implemented. I think the A76 might be the most balanced design for a mobile form factor this generation.shadowx360 - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
That is a design choice though, Apple could throttle the A12s for lower absolute power usage and still easily beat any Android competitor. Qualcomm said last year basically "what single threaded disadvantage?" when questioned about their poor performance compared to the A11 but then tacitly acknowledged the issue by using a 1+3 design with a souped up A76. They're probably not stating the obvious that ARM designs smaller cores than the massive Apple ones because no one is vertically integrated like Apple so every middle man has to take a cut so we end up with cheaper, smaller cores given to OEMs. If ARM were to make A12 sized designs, the end price for OEMs would go through the roof after Qualcomm and ARM do their markups.Raqia - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
My point is that an A12 sized CPU design is suitable for tablets and laptops but not very compelling for phones due to the current draw and the lack of compelling use cases on phones for raw CPU ALU throughput. Apple doesn't have an integrated modem so they have the luxury of extra die space for their big CPUs as well along with a simpler layout and a cheaper process due to the different foundry feature requirements for fixed function analog signal processing units like the modem; an integrated modem isn't necessarily faster or more energy efficient but there are substantial cost savings to the end user in the cost savings from integration. The stellar single threaded CPU benchmarking numbers make for great marketing but the secret was that it only lasted for as long as your battery could handle the wear. (Any of Apple's recent environmental initiatives are also mainly a virtue signaling marketing gimmick whose actual environmental impact would have been outweighed by simply giving users the options to swap out a battery cheaply rather than forcing an upgrade.)shadowx360 - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
They're the only OEM that doesn't make it a Herculean task to try to swap out a battery. So while I agree they should make their batteries higher, there hasn't been that much excess battery wear compared to Android devices in reality, as their batteries are warrantied for holding 80% of charge at 2 years. Quite a few of my older Android devices started to shut down on me after a couple years.shadowx360 - Saturday, March 9, 2019 - link
If you are saying the A76 is faster based on the previous pre-dive article, the benchmarks provided showed system performance in more realistic benchmarks. Peak CPU performance even on the M3 cores was already higher than the A75s by a good amount (going by SpecInt/Geekbench), the issue was in the abysmal scheduler and DVFS response times. I predict the M4 cores will easily blow away the A76 in raw performance but once again the actual real life system performance will be hampered by scheduler or other quirks.GlossGhost - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
So it is, always. And I do not have my hopes high for this Samsung cUsToM brew but I want it to be good.kaspar737 - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
Why didn’t Samsung go with A76 instead of A75?Fergy - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
@kaspar737 A76 is much larger than A75. They are a nice midway point between tiny A55 and huge M4Wilco1 - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
Certainly not - in the link below we have A76 = 3.5x A55. From this die photo we have A75 = 4x A55, M4 = 13.5x A55. Different processes of course, but A76 is not much larger.https://www.anandtech.com/show/13564/chiprebel-rel... we
anonomouse - Sunday, March 10, 2019 - link
This may not be a like for like comparison though, because the A55s in Kirin/Snapdragon have the L2, whereas these most likely do not - and the L2 is going to a significant fraction of the area for an A55.Wilco1 - Monday, March 11, 2019 - link
That's possible indeed. However the process makes a huge difference. SRAM seems to have terrible density on the 8nm process. Check how large each 1MB L3 slice is in 9820, larger than an A75, but on Kirin 980 a 2MB L3 slice easily fits in a A76...anonomouse - Tuesday, March 12, 2019 - link
That’s also a bit tough to say. We know the A76 is for sure larger than an A75 iso-process, and the A76s on the Kirin 980 have 512KB L2s. It’s not quite clear if the A75s on the 9820 have L2s either. From the die photo I suspect that they do not, but even if they do it doesn’t seem like it could be larger than 128KB from the arrangement of obvious macros of different sizes. Also note that the data arrays of the Exynos L3 slices are only about half the area of the entire slice, so that’s not quite the right comparison either as far as sram density.I should be clear though, none of this is to contest the point that the M4s seem ludicrously large in area for the performance they deliver. With that point, I fully agree. I’d probably ballpark the A76+512KB L2 at roughly being somewhere just a bit north of half the size of the M4 iso-process.
abufrejoval - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
Since Samsung most likely won't answer this directly, we can only speculate.Using the top-of-the-line A76 would have made the M4 more pointless for starters.
Then translating a design to a process is a significant effort. In some cases ARM will do the work, e.g. for a major node on TSMC. With Samsung 8nm, Samsung would have to do that themselves and they may not want to pay for that with every architecture ARM sells, unless it's the key selling point.
Also Samsung still has to pay per instance licenses for ARM cores and A75 is most likely cheaper than A76, while the A55 (or any secondary cores) costs almost nothing, when you've already paid for the A75.