The ARM Diaries, Part 2: Understanding the Cortex A12
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 17, 2013 12:30 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Arm
- SoCs
- Cortex A12
Performance Expectations & Final Words
ARM’s Cortex A9 was first released to licensees back in 2009, with design work beginning on the core years before that. To say that the smartphone market has changed tremendously over the past several years would be an understatement. Many of the assumptions that were true at the time of the Cortex A9’s development are no longer the case. There’s far more NEON/FP code in use on mobile platforms, higher frequency of memory accesses and much heavier performance demands in general. While the Cortex A9 was a good design for its time, its weaknesses on the FP and memory fronts needed addressing. Thankfully, Cortex A12 modernizes the segment.
Although ARM referred to Cortex A9 as an out-of-order design, in reality it supported out-of-order integer execution with in-order FP and memory operations. ARM’s Cortex A12 moves to an almost completely OoO design. All aspects of the design have been improved as well. Although the Cortex A9 is expected to continue to ramp in frequency over the next year as designs transition to 28nm HPM and beyond, Cortex A12 should deliver much better performance in an more energy efficient manner.
At the same frequency (looking just at IPC), ARM expects roughly a 40% uplift in performance over Cortex A9. The power efficiency and area implications are more interesting. ARM claims that on the same process node as a Cortex A9, a Cortex A12 design should be able to deliver the same or better power efficiency. The design achieves improved power efficiency by throwing more die area at the problem; ARM expects a Cortex A12 implementation to be up to 40% larger than a Cortex A9. Just like the increasing performance of the Cortex A15 line of microarchitectures necessitates development of the Cortex A9/A12 line, the increasing size of this line drives up demand for the Cortex A7/A53 family below it.
ARM’s unique business model allows for the extreme targeting and customization of its microprocessor IP portfolio. If one of its cores gets too large (or power hungry), there’s always a smaller/more energy efficient option downstream.
The Cortex A12 IP has been finalized as of a couple of weeks ago and is now available to licensees for integration. The first designs will likely ship in silicon in a bit over a year, with the first devices implementing Cortex A12 showing up in late 2014 or early 2015. Whether or not the design will be too late once it arrives is the biggest unknown. Qualcomm’s Krait 300 core should provide the smartphone market with an alternative solution, but the question is whether or not the mobile world will need a Cortex A12 when it shows up. We always like to say that there are no bad products, just bad pricing. A more aggressively priced alternative to a Snapdragon 600 class SoC may entice some customers. Until then, the latest revision to the Cortex A9 core (r4) is expected to carry the torch for ARM. ARM also tells us that we might see more power optimized implementations of Cortex A15 in the interim as well.
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wumpus - Thursday, July 18, 2013 - link
Most of the analysis of MIPS implies that it has a chance at the embedded world, but not a prayer where the chips listed in this article play. I would assume that Imagination has a long term plan to break into this market, but it will take some sort of extreme cost/power/performance advantage to convince anyone to give up an architecture. There is a reason that ARM64 is still a dominant architecture, and it has nothing to do with any inherent superiority of the instruction set (indeed, it is a disaster and an unholy kludge. While most of the time "the backward stuff" might be irrelevant to modern computing, it still takes up area, has to be validated, and still has warts that have to be dealt with every design). Changing architectures isn't taken lightly (see how wonderfully windows RT is doing).Qwertilot - Thursday, July 18, 2013 - link
Isn't the business model the major reason for the architecture getting so dominant? Given how cheaply/freely they license the architecture, you need a really strong motivation and/or massive scale to consider using anything else. Limits ARMs size of course.Mondozai - Friday, July 19, 2013 - link
"There is a reason that ARM64 is still a dominant architecture, and it has nothing to do with any inherent superiority of the instruction set"Sorry that's just lazy.
ARM is where it is because no comptetitor has managed an alternative that is sufficiently competitive to their architecture.
Legacy isn't an issue. If ARM was going irrelevant, the switch would occur, and very fast too.
fteoath64 - Friday, July 19, 2013 - link
Qualcomm is not worried right now because it is busy with serving higher priced solutions and it could hardly supply those customers!. Besides, Qualcomm has access to next-gen process in volumes that can crush MediaTek , Actions, HiSilicon etc by dropping prices in the next-gen offerings. That market will run out for MediaTek within 12 months, so Qualcomm is playing the game right for now. All ARM licensees can do whatever they want as long as they stay within their contractual obligations. These Chinese licensees better be careful les they get cut off from the license and had to seek alternative architectures (meaning none, what going Intel is suicide!). The idea of MediaTek and others taking the "lower-tier" of the market for 3-4 quarters is enough for all to feast on the market. They do not want Intel to come in to cream everything off and leaves nothing for the partners to live on. There is strategy and turf protection, these are no dumb companies having made it this far. They know most of the tricks and can outwit the or else they will die. You should know the difference between Chinese vendors and western vendors, the Chinese manufacturers are happy to sell a wholesaler a phone for $110 when it cost them $80 to make. ie profit $30. The wholesaler turns around and sell it for $180 making $40-50 each after all the distribution costs etc. Western companies will see this unit for $300 retail!. The difference is greed even when the manufacturer provided goodwill in the factory price. The reason factories put a limited profit on each unit is to move the volumes because they know full well what the market price is going to be. They do not want to inflate it further.lilmoe - Thursday, July 18, 2013 - link
I'm sure you have valid points too, but you're not getting my side of the story. MediaTech's solution is pretty solid, yes, but it's strictly Cortex A9. Consumer demand, even in developing countries, is growing, and the need for faster chips is growing as well. By 2015, what makes you think that Krait wont be competitive in price with higher performance? Qualcomm needs only to re-badge their already developed chips with higher clock speeds.Profit margins are way higher in developed countries, it's just a matter of time that even current flagship devices be slashed in price (with a slight change in design and chassis) and they're ready to take on the cheapest Chinese OEMs have to offer...
Anyway, this doesn't change the fact that ARM made a mistake in its priorities. Cortex A15 (big.LITTLE) should have been targeted for 20/22nm and smaller processes. Priority should have been for Cortex A12. And yes, flagships (hero phones) could have made use of that core if it was ready by this time, especially since it could have competed really well with Krait in both power efficiency and performance (most probably beating it if ARM's claims are to be believed in that regard.
Qwertilot - Thursday, July 18, 2013 - link
The world, and A15 in particular, isn't just mobile phones :) The Samsung Chromebook, early versions of the micro server hardware, shield aren't all massive volume but they've started the process of starting to get Arm chips accepted in a bunch of device classes where they just didn't previously exist.(Phone wise it did end up powering a lot of S4's.).
You can see that could easily be more attractive/important as a priority for ARM than picking fights with existing licensees over high end mobile phones.
If Qualcomm/ (Intel too of course) end up directly taking on the cheapest that the Chinese OEMs have to offer they've basically already lost as there's then so little profit left. They have to somehow make the case for more expensive but also more powerful/efficient chips. At some point that'll get hard.
lilmoe - Thursday, July 18, 2013 - link
True, it isn't only for mobile devices (smartphones and tablets), but those make the absolute majority of demand. ARM has too much competition to face in the server world, a world that already has tons of existing x86 code. By the time they're ready to seriously fight in the server world, 14nm would be the norm.Again, my argument isn't about which chip goes where, or who should compete where, it's about timing and priorities of architecture designs, which ARM clearly screwed up on. At least that's how I see it.
Mondozai - Friday, July 19, 2013 - link
lilmoe wrote:"By 2015, what makes you think that Krait wont be competitive in price with higher performance? Qualcomm needs only to re-badge their already developed chips with higher clock speeds."
And what makes you think that the competition will stand still until that time?
They could get better SoC's based on the A-12 by that time, to just name one (out of many) possibilities.
lilmoe - Friday, July 19, 2013 - link
They WILL stand still because Cortex A12 isn't ready to ship yet. It'll be a good 2 years before it's "cheaply" manufactured by the likes of MediaTec.By the way, Krait powered Nokia Lumias are going for around and less than the $200 mark right now. People are forgetting that Android isn't the only contender in the market. OS market share will most probably look very different in 2015.
There are many dynamics running the low power processor market.
Wilco1 - Wednesday, July 17, 2013 - link
It's only late if you consider it a directly competitor of Silvermont. However A9R4 as used by Tegra 4i seems perfectly timed.