Arm Unveils Next-Gen Flagship Core: Cortex-X3
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fuse.wikichip.org
Can we have a discussion about this CPU instead of talking about others? M1/M2 are not even the current top performing CPUs...
They're both RISC, but P9/P10/etc is based on IBM's own Power microarchitecture (possibly open sourced / open standard), I wasn't aware it had anything to do with Arm? I could be hopelessly wrong...
Or do you mean something different with "POWER"?
And power is open in that the ISA is open. Power10 is a bang up to date CPU so the internals are all closed.
On Laptop/Server side Qualcomm need to catch up to AMD/Apple.
Compared to iOS, everything is slightly clunkier.
The performance per watt in ARM exceeded x86 since long ago, but most manufacturers used that feat to create mobile CPUs instead of cranking up the power to see if it catches up to high performance x86
On the other hand Apple can make expensive SoC without worrying about sales
Apple can decide that it is switching from Intel to ARM and not looking back so it not only realizes costs from investing in ARM but it ultimately will realize savings from not having to support Intel.
There is no real unity behind Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo and all the other vendors, plus the motto of Windows users is "who moved my cheese?" You don't use Windows because Windows is the best operating system, you use Windows because it has the most software, and that software is written for and optimized for the x86 platform. Microsoft is always floating ARM-based systems as a hobby but it cannot make the commitment that it is going "all in" so it has to support Intel as the primary processor for the foreseeable future, so the ARM transition costs Microsoft but never saves them anything.
On top of that Microsoft is dependent on vendors like NVIDIA and AMD to supply drivers for graphics cards and all the other parts for their machines and getting them all to supply good drivers for ARM is yet another big ask. Apple can say "here is the supported hardware" and not have to fight with vendors who have the power to torpedo their ambitions.
I find it somewhat ironic that in wanting for a few CEO's to "Embrace… Extinguish" Linux in favor of Windows, Microsoft eventually created a world where Windows is a sink on their resources they yet can't axe because though not anymore a money-maker in its own right, Windows remains the basis for pretty much all their money-makers. In becoming a "software-first" company, they pretty much followed if not provoked the very paradigm that makes Windows a non-monetizable entity next to as-good-as-embedded MacOS and ever-free Linux.
Linux which, incidentally, is also THE basis for money-makers worldwide and the OSS model means nobody using it today had to fork even 1% of the real cumulative cost of that kernel + ecosystem since the 1990's. How's that for a win, Linux 1:0 Microsoft — that the winner did not even seek, busy doing its own thing, while the other pretty much dug its own commercial grave out of 'relevance debt' (not sure how to word what Windows has become)…
TL;DR: it's like this big item taking all your inventory yet that you can't ditch ever because it's required to do all your quests. In games, you wish devs forgot about that crap and just made the inventory that much smaller. In real life, Microsoft can't kill Windows without closing business overnight. sad_pikachu_face.jpg
[Note that IMHO, MS is incredibly strong nowadays, so they'll find a way, and this is a fantastic learning experience for the industry.]
Although a phone has tons of power, and can probably function as a low-end desktop, the lack of a sizeable cooling solution, or even just a plain heatsink, would cause it to throttle pretty quickly.
I have to believe this is the reason, or otherwise someone would have done it already (successfully that is) for such an obvious use case.
If that was an issue you would see it already all around.
> Although a phone has tons of power, and can probably function as a low-end desktop, the lack of a sizeable cooling solution, or even just a plain heatsink, would cause it to throttle pretty quickly.
I would rather compare it to laptops and processing power of snapdragon 8 is rather in mid-upper segment of average available on the market laptop
ARM is also a different platform with way better computing performance per Watt ratio from regular PC, there is throttling, but when it kicks in it doesn't reduce your performance so significantly
> I have to believe this is the reason, or otherwise someone would have done it already (successfully that is) for such an obvious use case.
Believe, or not - the reasons why it wasn't done so far are far beyond technical reasons and we could have computer like capable phones long time ago already.
https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/macbook-pro-2022-battery-l...
That's pretty impressive for staying on the same process node.
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2022-M2-L...
Yeah, the OS matters, but it isn’t the only thing that matters to most people (and with the web, the loss-of-applications cost of switching your OS is a lot lower than it used to be).
Lots of Windows users migrating to Mac for performance reasons
There's no magic in those chips. Power efficiency is a design parameter you may optimize for or not, and ARM server chips dissipate more power because they have a lot more cores, more memory controllers, more cache, more IO, and, in general, a lot more stuff than a personal computer CPU would make sense to have. Computation per computation, they are not far from each other.
Intel's x86 ISA mandates a more computation to happen per amount of useful computation served - lots of memory write reordering, lots of instruction alignment (instructions can have from 1 to 15 bytes, IIRC) and other operations that do not translate into anything useful for the user beyond a higher IPC if your instruction stream is just right, but, also dissipate a lot of power for that.
The M1 is the stick by which all new ARM chips are going to be measured for a while.
The M1 Max is arguably price competitive with Intel 12900K, at half the performance and 1/6 wattage (at full load).
The M1 Ultra is twice the price, closer in performance, for 1/3 wattage.
My alder lake is faster than an M1, my alder lake needs 4 fans
I don't understand why ARM wants to throw away AArch32/Thumb/Jazelle et al.
This really shouldn't be in a phone - a lot of Android apps bundle 32-bit binaries for various purposes, and they won't run on this CPU.
I can see why Fujitsu mandated AArch64, but my phone isn't going to be on the Top 500, and there were benefits to these old instruction sets.
Why cling to any remnant?
Because of this, very few Linux distros supporting the PI are 64-bit (Oracle Linux is the only one that comes to mind).
There does indeed remain a large AArch32 community that cannot move, and they will never, ever cross this gulf.
What are?
Today Emacs is puny compared to The Browser.
Edit: Small miss above...Cortex-X2 dropped aarch32, though that's 2021 versus Apple doing it in 2017 with the A11, so the overall point is the same.
It was simply no market for solo aarch64 before, since a lot of costumers wanted the backup of having aarch32 compatibility.
What the article says on this topic:
"The process of eliminating 32-bit and optimizing for the 64-bit ISA exclusively has been a 2-step process. With the Cortex-X2, the underlying circuitry used for handling 32-bit architectural-related elements was removed, saving on transistors and simplifying some structures. With the new Cortex-X3, the design team took the time to start optimizing specifically for AArch64."
At some point it got twisted into "double the speed", but Moore's Law as originally formulated was precisely about this - doubling transistor count.
Disclaimer: Not an EE / HW designer. Going off of memory from tech news + some university courses (info may be incorrect / stale).
I was seriously considering being a chip engineer for a while and did my master's thesis on adder design.
They're constrained by what their customers want. Yes it's nice to have the highest performing chip but plenty of space in the mobile market for less than best CPUs. Anyone buying arm CPUs doesn't have the A15 as an option so in a sense it's not a competitor. Someone selling premium phones is trying to out-compete apple but how much does the raw performance stats matter to the consumer markets?
I think there's also a tendency for everyone to want to do their own CPU now. Qualcomm and Samsung might want their arm micro-architecture to be the A15 killer and only buy the lower performance cores off arm for instance.
I wonder how many of these are actually vanity projects? Apple spent billions for more than a decade on ARM development before using their own design as a central processor.
OTOH MediaTek et all don’t worry about any of that.
For their computer platforms. Apple has been using ARM since the Newton.
Anyone who wants to differentiate from competition building x86 boxes will have to use a non-x86 design. Viable ones these days are mostly POWER for workstations and servers, and ARM for everything between mobile and midrange servers.
If you build a commodity computer based on the same components everyone else has access to, your margin will be squeezed. If your product has different characteristics than your direct competition and that difference is advantageous on a given segment, your competitors will have trouble moving in. That's why Apple M-series and IBM mainframe CPUs are not available to anyone without a full computer attached.
The Newton used a regular ARM design (that was back when Apple owned a huge chunk of ARM). They used 3P ARMs for the main processor of other devices for years (e.g. time capsule or some video dongles).
That one sentence of mine you referred two made two points: 1 - it took a long time for apple to get to the point where they could replace external designs as the core processor for a device (starting with the phone) and 2 - that they had by that time quite a bit of experience for using their own designs for subsidiary processors inside their devices. All of that is a pretty complex undertaking.
> If you build a commodity computer based on the same components everyone else has access to, your margin will be squeezed. If your product has different characteristics than your direct competition and that difference is advantageous on a given segment, your competitors will have trouble moving in.
Well, it’s all about where your locus of differentiation is; all else you want to commoditize. It’s not like Apple makes their own DRAM, and those suppliers are the ones that get their margins squeezed (especially by Apple — look at who their CEO is).
And the lack of a CPU design team is a competitive advantage for the MediaTeks of this world, even if it’s not exclusive to them. Instead the very lack of exclusivity in cpu has a network effect value for them. This is what killed arm competitors like MIPS.
In 2008 Apple acquired PA Semi and two years later they released an iPad powered by the A4, their first in-house design. Many acquisitions and designs later, their performance started to approach the performance of Intel chips used in their desktops and laptops. It was a very complex undertaking and they nailed it on every step.
All Apple computer ISA transitions were driven by external factors. Motorola gave up on the 68K family (a dead end for them) in favor of the 88K RISC processors (where they thought they had a chance), Motorola and IBM gave up on PPC and never delivered a low power G5 (they offered Apple Cell instead). Finally, Intel didn't give Apple the special treatment it needed to differentiate from other laptops and, since by then Apple had phone and tablet SoCs that were competitive with Intel parts and there was lots of commonality between macOS and iOS, that last choice was easy. Depending on a third party for the component more easily usable to set you apart from your competition is never great. If Apple moves their Macs and mobile devices away from ARM, it'll be the first time Apple decides that without a "catastrophic" event from outside.
As a company, they don't like being at the mercy of someone else if they can help it.
True. Up until now, it was always betting the company on someone else's silicon roadmap. Now they control it completely.
I mean... I think it's the opposite. There was a time when Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia had their own microarchs which they used in most things. Increasingly they're back to ARM-supplied designs now.
I suspect this is partly because the ARM designs are adequate these days, but also because phone CPUs just aren't that competitive anymore; the iPhone is enormously faster than any other phone, and consumers do not care about this at all, because the other phones are, generally, Good Enough.
Indeed but I'm wondering if we'll see a swing back, if they're all selling SoCs with the same set of arm IP in varying configurations what's the differentiating factor? I suspect there's an aspect of 'arm never builds what we want' as arm needs to satisfy multiple people that would drive them to build their own design at the high end. That said I've only got a hunch and can't recall concrete evidence for this.
It seems to me like modern core design is expensive and high risk/low reward for most of these companies. Remember, Apple has a ton of R&D and the margins to put massive cores into just about everything they sell, upto and including putting a CPU faster than most desktops into their "budget" monitor. Fabbing costs keep going up and the extra revenue from larger+faster CPUs would get gobbled up by TSMC and Samsung Fab. Setting out to build something faster at the same size and R&D is what eats your profit.
For Qualcomm, Samsung, Google (for Pixel at least), and NVidia, ARMs balance of performance/die size/efficiency is aligned well with their market positions and the opportunity cost of rolling their own is just too high even in the face of thinning margins from competition.
“ The End of the Road for General Purpose Processors & the Future of Computing - Prof. John L. Hennessy”
https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/end-road-general-purpose-proc...
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319968-google-microsof...
See monocasa's comment.
And the reason that I'm assuming that no one else has the same 'special relationship' is that it's a not well kept secret that Apple designed large parts of the base AArch64 with ARM and simply owns the IP on large parts of the ISA, similar to how at this point both AMD and Intel practically own x86 due to their different contributions over the years. Qualcomm, et al can not say the same.
Anyway, I think my comment is still valid.
The "special relationship" is just fanboy fantasy. Qualcomm and Marvell have both in past done ground up designs that significantly differs from any ARM silicon.
If you don't believe me, fell free to provide actual proof of this special license.
Particularly the new instructions are damning as ARM has said they are specifically disallowing custom instructions this go around in order to combat architecture fragmentation.
In comparison an X3 is a much faster chip clock-for-clock per watt on a per core basis because it's built for ultimate ST performance on a power budget. X3 has a full 6-way decoder vs 4 on Ares. So straight off the bat you can decode 1.5x as many instructions. X3 has a 320 entry ROB vs 128 on an N1 so you can keep over twice as many instructions in flight. An N1 has 3 ALU pipes, an ALU with MAC and DIV, and two FPU pipes. X3 on the other hand has 4 ALU, an ALU/MUL pipe, and an ALU/MAC/DIV pipe. On the FPU side it has two FMAC pipes and two FDIV pipes.
The X3 is a much larger and more powerful core than an N2 little alone an N1 and deserves to be called a flagship core in every sense of the word.
You won't be able to directly increase production of what's actually really hard to get at the moment (microcontrollers and small functional devices using "ancient" process nodes) by decreasing production of cutting edge processes