ARM focuses on limiting throttling with Cortex A73 design and G71 GPU

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ARM focuses on efficiency and mitigating throttling with its upcoming Cortex A73 microarchitecture and G71 GPU. The G71 should follow the Mali T880 from, among others, the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Huawei P9.

Cortex A73 is the successor to Cortex A72, says ARM. It therefore seems intended for the fast processor cores in big.Little configurations of socs, such as Mediatek, Huawei and Samsung, among others, with faster cores and smaller, more economical cores. However, A73 cores are smaller than A72 and A57, claims the British processor designer. On a 10nm finfet process, A73 cores take up 0.65mm2 per core.

The A73 is the first design of ARM’s Artemis family of microarchitectures, Anandtech says. The most important factor is ‘sustained performance’, the ability to function at the highest clock speed for a longer period of time. This is necessary for applications such as virtual reality, which demand a lot from the hardware.

Huawei, Mediatek and Marvell, among others, have so far licensed A73 and will therefore presumably make socs based on this design. That’s no surprise: Huawei and Mediatek already have socs with A72 cores, including the Kirin 955 from the Huawei P9 and the MT8173 soc from Mediatek. Samsung and Qualcomm, who still used Cortex A57, have switched to their own microarchitectures. Samsung uses its Exynos M1 design in the soc for the Galaxy S7, where Qualcomm has made Kryo for the Snapdragon 820 from the LG G5, HTC 10 and Xiaomi Mi5, among others.

Also new is the Mali G71 GPU, which should be the successor of the T880 GPU. ARM claims that in terms of performance it can keep up with mobile GPUs from, among others, Nvidia on a graphical benchmark such as GFBench. The G71 will come in various configurations from one to 32 cores. The versions with sixteen cores have a TDP of 16W, that is unknown for the other variants.

The G71 is based on BiFrost architecture, which succeeds Midgard from the T880, among others. The G71 should also be VR capable with support for 120Hz drive, support for 4k resolutions at that refresh rate, and a graphics pipeline latency of 4ms. Limiting latency between users’ movement in VR and the display of images is important in preventing nausea and promoting the idea that it is a ‘real’ world.

Both the Cortex A73 and G71 should appear in smartphones from early 2017. It is likely that manufacturers will announce socs that have A73 and G71 on board from the end of this year.

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