The second generation ARMv9 processor cores have just been unveiled by the parent company – the Cortex-X3 and A715. The small A510 core also received a slight refinement. The new design will enable increased performance, improved efficiency and new, more powerful configurations.
Let’s start with the Cortex-X3. According to ARM, this is the third year of double-digit IPC growth (Instructions Per Cycle, ie how much the CPU can do at a set clock speed). Like its predecessors, the X-core is focused on top performance.
Compared to the best Android chipsets at the moment (using the Cortex-X2), the new core will deliver a 25% jump in performance (an average of the improvements shown on Geekbench 5 and two SPECint tests word). As for Windows on ARM designs (which lags slightly behind the smartphone chips), the expected improvements will be 34%.
Note: this is per-core enhancement, ARM redesigned the supporting hardware to allow more CPU cores to be used in performance-oriented disk drives.
The new Cortex-A715 core completes ARM’s transition away from 32-bit processors (as far as smartphones are concerned). This enabled the engineering team to make the instruction decoder hardware 4 times smaller. While the X2 was already a 64-bit single core, ARM had more time to work and improve the X3 design to better fit the ARMv9 instruction set (which according to the company is more predictable and frequent than ARMv8) .
Back to the A715, it is 20% more power efficient than the A710 at the same performance. Or it can provide 5% more performance for the same power consumption (it assumes the cores are cut on the same node).
There is no new small core, but with a few tweaks ARM has managed to make it Cortex-A510 5% more power efficient compared to its 2021 incarnation.
Let’s zoom out from the core level and look at the entire disk set. ARM has redesigned its DynamIQ Shared Unit system to accommodate up to 12 core processors with 16 MB L3 cache. And note the composition – the most powerful designs will contain 8x Cortex-X3 and 4x Cortex-A715 with little core.
1 + 3 + 4 designs like the current flagship chips will still be possible, just like 1 + 4 + 4 and 2 + 2 + 4. This will enable ARM customers (Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek) to design chips that perfectly fit a particular performance and power casing.
Source | Via