Give Samsung a hand: Chaebol pulls back Arm to strike Intel's chips Samsung has said its chip foundry building Arm Cortex-A76-based processors will use 7nm process tech in the second half of the year, with 5nm product expected mid-2019 using the extreme ultra violet (EUV) lithography process. The A76 64-bit chips will be able to pass 3GHz in clock speed. Back in May we wrote: "Arm reckoned a …
"general notebook users won't notice performance differences between Arm and low-end Xeon-powered notebooks."
Is this correct? New, mobile workstation-class ARM chips would be insane. New, low end Pentium beating ARMs would be cool, but not quite the same.
See this. Ok its not low end but it sound like a Samsung/Arm could soon be giving it a run for its money and waste considerably less power in the process. ie a true notebook rather than a desk mounted portable unless you like incinerated kneecaps.
Would be very, very interested in seeing what the standby power consumption is like on those chips as down at that size, current leakage starts to dominate, you can have real trouble actually turning anything off, primarily due to quantum tunnelling and thermal effects.
It can also really affect reliability, process tolerances are insanely tight and, as you're already operating at the limit, a tightly controlled gate can still have false switches due to the aforementioned quantum tunnelling and thermal effects. Once you combine process drift with them, you find the percentage of gates performing unpredictably can rise significantly.
Not showstoppers, but a huge engineering challenge.
Besides, Intel CPUs these days are hybrids. Their instruction timings are highly variable, able to go quickly for simple instructions, and spreading out when you start getting complicated or need to dig into the memory. I don't believe any other architecture to date is all that different, as the main stumbling block is the complexity of the instruction itself. An architecture that doesn't have a complex instruction simply has to make it up with a bunch of simpler ones, so it's a wash that way.
This is where ARM gets to reap the benefits of their business model. The pain of producing their designs at the latest 5nm size is somebody else's problem to a large extent. Intel, on the other hand, build their own fabs to produce their chips, so they need to get the RoI before they can upgrade. Intel, ultimately, are doomed I feel.
If that were so, AMD would've eaten them for lunch already. I suspect there are benefits to vertical integration (in this case, Intel having their own fabs), be it quicker turnaround or a better ability to adapt to conditions (recall that it was AMD that was first to x64 with the Opteron, but Intel--with its in-house fabs--managed to leapfrog and keep well ahead of AMD for at least a decade).
I will admit that Intel's instruction set is both gift (allowing it to support more software than just about any other architecture out there) and curse (supporting all that stuff entails carrying a lot of baggage), but they're also kind of stuck with it which is why they've more or less dropped their work on alternative processors (including ARM). The fact they're IINM still the go-to architecture for performance applications also gives them a leg up on any other non-x86 architecture that wants to try to support that kind of software (since any kind of emulation, such as Qualcomm's attempts, are probably going to really stink in performance-intensive applications).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
