In the seven years after 2009, the neutral energy of smart phones has increased 100 times! Mobile phones have been able to realize many functions that could not be realized before, such as lightning fast operation response speed and unparalleled user experience, but the power consumption has always remained at the same level. This is an unparalleled achievement, and this design is very challenging in the mobile field.
This kind of performance, function and user experience has driven a remarkable market. In 2016, the global mobile phone shipments will have an opportunity to reach an astonishing 1.5 billion units. With the change of consumer concept, the design direction of smart phones has changed, and mobile phones have become a platform for future innovation in many aspects. Such as virtual reality and ultra-high definition visualization, the performance requirements of smart phones based on audio processing and computer level video processing become increasingly high. In recent years, smart phones have become thinner and thinner, which has largely limited the design of body heat dissipation, battery and power management circuit. With the stagnant battery technology, it is impossible to increase the battery capacity under the same size. If you want to continue to improve the endurance level and user experience of the mobile phone, you can only hope to reduce the power consumption level of the hardware. For example, the processor has higher efficiency, so as to improve the overall endurance performance of the mobile phone.
To this end, ARM announced its latest high-performance processor, Cortex-A73. ARM is accelerating its pace of innovation. One year after the introduction of Cortex-A72, it launched the A73 core, which will be used on smartphones released in early 2017.
Cortex-A73 is specially optimized for mobile devices and consumer devices in design. The most exciting point is efficient performance improvement:
Improve the maximum performance of the processor, with the operating frequency up to 2.8GHz;
The power efficiency is greatly improved, and the power consumption is reduced by 30% to maintain the best user experience;
Process improvement, built-in ARMv8-A core with the smallest volume.
The new Cortex-A73 is currently the most efficient and high-performance processor in ARM. The following are some of the main features of Cortex-A73:
Cortex-A73: ARMv8A high-performance processor
Cortex-A73 supports the full-size ARMv8-A architecture, which is very suitable for mobile devices and consumer devices. ARMv8-A includes ARM TrustZone technology NEON、 Virtualization and encryption technology. Both 32-bit and 64 bit Cortex-A73 can provide the most adaptable mobile application ecological development environment. Cortex-A73 includes 128 bit AMBR 4 ACE interface and ARM bit LITTLE system integration interface.
Highest performance
Cortex-A73 is a high-performance processor specially designed for the next generation of smart phones. Cortex-A73 is manufactured with the most advanced 10nm technology, and can provide 30% more continuous processing capacity than Cortex-A72. At the maximum operating frequency of 2.8GHz, the processor reaches the peak of processing performance. Benefiting from the advantages of the 10nm process, the processor can continuously operate efficiently at close to the highest frequency. Such stability is rare among today's processors.
Performance optimization for mobile devices
The Cortex-A73 microprocessor architecture contains some interesting performance optimizations. It supports the most advanced algorithms, uses a 64KB instruction cache, and has high-performance instruction prefetching. The main performance improvement is the data storage system, which uses advanced L1 cache and L2 cache to speed up the operation in complex operating environments.
The above performance improvement for mobile devices makes the operating frequency of Cortex-A73 10% higher than that of Cortex-A72. We hope to cooperate with manufacturers in the design of mobile phones, so that the chip can have a higher working frequency in actual use than all previous processors, so as to improve operating efficiency. In addition, compared with Cortex-A72, the new Cortex-A73 can also reduce the memory usage by 15% through NEON complex data processing in multi task processing and system operation.
Power efficiency advantages
Although the performance has improved, the power of Cortex-A73 has not increased compared with Cortex-A72, but has decreased. The A73 is optimized and improved in many aspects. Compared with the A72, the total power of its integer operation workload is reduced by more than 20%, and its floating point operation performance and storage performance are stronger. The improvement of power efficiency can bring better user experience, longer battery life and longer battery life. The improvement of power efficiency can make SoC have more callable idle processing performance to improve system and graphics processing performance, so as to provide higher performance, better visual effects, higher frame rate and new functions.
ARM core with the smallest chip area
The 10nm process not only brings the stability of continuous high-frequency operation, but also significantly reduces the core area of the chip, which is also the smallest ARM chip at present. Compared with Cortex-A53, the chip area is reduced by 70%, compared with Cortex-A72, the chip area is reduced by 40%, and the core area is also reduced by 25%. The use of 10nm and 16nm processes can not only significantly improve the performance of the processor, but also reduce the use area of the silicon circle of the processor core, and reduce the cost of SoC and equipment while improving the performance.
Improve mid tier smart phones
With our big With the improvement of LITTLE technology, ARM provides strong scalability, and our partners can optimize their systems accordingly. This means that manufacturers can design SoC calls according to their own preferences, such as using only one or two large cores, or using four small cores. The second level cache of SoC can be expanded to 1MB at most to support the computing requirements of high performance or high load cores. Big. LITTLE technology has been widely used in the mobile processor market. For example, Cortex-A73 and Cortex-A53 are used together to form a typical eight core high-end processor. In addition, Cortex-A73 can also improve the processing performance of mid tier processors. For example, the design of two core Cortex-A73 with four core Cortex-A53 can improve the multi-core performance by more than 30% compared with the eight core Cortex-A53. The peak performance of a single core is more than twice that of Cortex-A53, which can greatly improve the user experience.
