Intel Corp (INTC)

[Unkwn]

Everything you ever wanted to know about ARM Cortex-A53/57

Interesting indeed!

For example this part:

The difference in power is quite staggering: What jumps out immediately as out of the norm is the relatively low power consumption the 5430 is able to achieve. In the past we've seen A15 cores consume well northwards of 1.5W per core, something I've verified in the Exynos 5410 and Kirin 920. The combination of r3 A15 silicon IP and 20nm in the 5430 seems to have dramatically lowered the power consumption of the A15 to levels comparable to Qualcomm's Krait cores. It seems Samsung has gained a lot of experience with the A15 over the years and fed this back into the 5430, resulting in basically twice the power efficiency over past SoCs such as the 5420. While the A15 numbers are interesting, we're here to check out the A57.

Alas, it doesn't look as good for the new cores. On a pure per-core basis it seems the A57 is about twice as power hungry. This is a significant figure that is quite worrisome. Investigating the voltages of the big cores on both SoCs reveals that the 5433 increases the voltage on the A57 cores by a rough 75mV across most used frequencies. We're averaging 1175mV at 1800MHz across the various speed bins, and reaching up to 1262mV on the worst speed bins at 1.9GHz. This results in some very high figures for the stock speeds of the 5433, being able to momentarily reach over 7W load on the big cluster. The thermal management doesn't allow this state to be sustained for more than 10 seconds when loading 4 threads, with the frequencies quickly dropping onto the first thermal throttling levels.

So, basically in order to gain a 25% performance plus for SpecInt compared to A15, it consumes twice the power. That's not that efficient and kind of shows the problems they all are facing with mobile cores. To improve their speed a bit, they have to eat much higher power consumption. We'll see who is going to make the best trade among them.

What is funny that already four of the cores start to overheat after 10 seconds! So they are bragging with benchmarks using all eight cores (including the little ones within big.little), but already running the four big cores can't be done longer than 10 seconds? This really is only about bragging with numbers, not actual applications. Completely senseless.

Also the modem part is interesting. Samsung seems to want to avoid Qualcomm and Intel for their modems as much as possible. The problem for Samsung will always be that it is in direct competition with device manufacturers, not exactly wanting them to use Samsung parts if there are alternatives in the market. Since Samsung loses market share in mobile, it is not the best position for them to be in - lots of money to be spent, little share to be gained, unless they beat the competition by a high margin (not yet the case).

Qualcomm on the other hand seems to lose almost the entire Samsung business. So we have Samsung lose, Qualcomm lose - hopefully Intel gain one day (which isn't difficult at the current level).