The new flagship is here again! Interpretation of ARM Cortex-A77 architecture

Cortex-A76 is a bright product in 20 18. Both Qualcomm and Huawei have designed excellent products by using this advanced architecture, which greatly improves the performance of mobile computing devices and still maintains a very high energy consumption ratio. In 20 19, ARM did not relax, but further introduced the new Cortex-A77 architecture. This new architecture not only brings more significant performance improvement, but also controls the power consumption of the equipment well, which is worth reading carefully.

Cortex-A77 is a brand-new architecture. Compared with the microcomputer introduced before, Cortex-A77 is the second product belonging to Austin family. This architecture will be formally applied to many new SoCs at the end of 20 19 or the beginning of 2020. Today, this article will analyze the performance and architecture of this product in detail.

The "God of Fear" appeared

Code-named Cortex-A77 of Deimos.

ARM maintains a new architecture model at the pace of architecture release every year, so it is not surprising that a new Cortex-A77 architecture is suddenly released. In fact, earlier, like last August, ARM announced that it would release a brand-new architecture code-named "Deimos" on 20 19, and it would be manufactured by 7nm process. Speaking of the word "Deimos", it actually refers to the son of Ares and Aphrodite in Greek mythology, and is called the God of Fear.

▲ARM released Cortex-A77 architecture.

In addition, by the way, ARM also announced the architecture code "Hercules" that will appear in 2020. The name comes from the son of Zeus and alcmene in ancient Greek mythology, symbolizing Hercules.

The name is radiant, and the corresponding strength cannot lag behind others. When ARM released these contents and network diagrams, it also poked fun at Intel. In the comparison chart displayed by ARM, Intel's processor architecture was tested at SPECint 20 16, starting from Core i5-4300U after 20 13 and ending at Core i5-7300U after 20 17. Although the process developed from 22nm to 14nm, the actual performance was not satisfactory.

▲ARM claims that Cortex-A77 will bring more than 20% integer performance improvement.

Judging from the current ARM products, the Cortex-A76 generation can be said to have met the best opportunity. Excellent architecture design and the application of 7nm process make it show a huge performance jump in the actual SoC products compared with the previous generation products. For example, the performance of Snapdragon 855 processor based on Cortex-A76 architecture can be improved by up to 45% compared with the previous generation of Xiaolong 845 processor. It is particularly worth mentioning that such a huge performance improvement has not had much impact on battery efficiency, and even the battery life of equipment has been extended because of new technologies and architectures.

▲ The overall performance of ▲Cortex-A76 is satisfactory, and the test data comes from AnandTech.

In terms of power consumption, the power consumption of Cortex-A77 may be slightly higher than that of Cortex-A76. However, from some new processor design viewpoints in the industry, the processor configuration adopted by the new SoC has become a "large core+core+energy-saving core" scheme, and there should be no big problem in power consumption control.

Finally, let's look at manufacturing and products. The two major customers of Cortex-A77 are believed to be Huawei Hisilicon and Qualcomm Snapdragon. With 7nm technology, we will gradually see these products listed in the second half of the year or early next year. At that time, we can test whether the compound growth rate of 20%~25% declared by ARM can be realized.