Hacker News Reader

Comment by sanxiyn | Hacker News Reader

"Cyclone is a wide machine. It can decode, issue, execute and retire up to 6 instructions/micro-ops per clock."

This is truly amazing. In comparison, Cortex-A15 can issue 3 instructions per cycle, for example.

Nvidia's Denver is said to have 7. It's also rumored to have 2x the performance of Cortex A15. If it's true it could reach Sandy Bridge performance level either at first or 2nd gen (on FinFET 16nm) and Haswell/Broadwell level by 3rd gen (most people don't realize the performance between Haswell/Broadwell compared to Sandy Bridge is only like 15-20 percent, since Intel stopped focusing on performance). I also think in 2nd gen Denver SoC (2 process nodes from Tegra K1), Nvidia will have at least a 1 Tflops, possibly 1.2 Tflops GPU (Xbox One level).

It is interesting that in the 'chip wars' everyone went to Intel for their chips (or Motorola) and that allowed a lot of R&D to be re-couped. But as Apple is baking their own chips, what is the market for Nvidia's Denver? It has to compete with Broadcom, Samsung, and others for a fraction of the Android device pool? Challenging to justify the levels of R&D that Apple is applying without a predictable return.

That said, I'm going to be watching for the Denver chip, it will be an interesting counter point to the A7.

By the time Denver based devices are on market, Apple will be releasing A8 based devices, so it will probably be competing with A8 rather than A7.

> But as Apple is baking their own chips, what is the market for Nvidia's Denver?

Essentially, Qualcomm's market.

Never believe anything about unreleased NVidia SOCs

Keyword being "up to". There's a reason Intel hasn't really upped the issue width much, despite x86 having higher code density than ARM -- memory bandwidth. It's hard to keep wide execution cores saturated.

Whatching those Mill presentations just spoiled me...

Cortex A-15 can also run at nearly double the clock rate though: 2.5 GHz vs 1.4 GHz.

> Cortex A-15 can also run at nearly double the clock rate

Cortex A-15 _does_ run at nearly double the clock rate (though with a substantially higher energy consumption on the rare occasion it actually scales up all the way). Apple is historically very conservative with its mobile device clock speeds, and I'd expect that Cyclone has a fair bit of headroom here.

I say "can" because most Cortex-A15 design implementations don't actually run that fast. Mostly 1.6-2 GHz. Of course, we are comparing a design that's licensed out from ARM to a fixed product from Apple, so it's not a totally fair comparison.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A15#Systems_on_a_chi...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com