Replies to post #136450 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[ibc]

No way Apple can bump up the speed of the core from 1.3 GHz (iPhone 5S) or 1.4 GHz (iPad Air) to 2.0 GHz without completely rearchitecting the core with "hyperpipeling" in the style of Pentium 4.

Why not?

It may be a new microarchitecture.
QCOM's processors run at 2.5GHz in 28nm.
Exynos has 1.9GHz in 28nm.

I wouldn't call the Cortex-A15 "Hyper-pipelined".

[mas]

Cyclone is reasonably pipelined with a branch mispredict penalty of 16 cycles (14-19 typical). I suspect it is power considerations that is holding it back from 2+ GHz clockspeeds as they increased the ipc on an already wide fat cpu going from A7 to A8 which probably took up most of the power benefit shrinking to 20nm although the next iPad will probably gain another 100-200 MHz due to the tablet form factor. It will need the power reducing feature of FinFETs though to get a lot closer to 2 GHz. Cyclone is basically an ARM Alpha clone which is why it gets close to Core in ipc and is not indicative of usual ARM mobile cpus which are a third/half as wide as Cyclone. Nvidia's Project Denver is as wide but it is in-order which reduces that advantage.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarchitecture-detailed

Regardless though the merchant ARMy have nothing like the potential Cyclone has as they are already maxed out (or close to) on clockspeed so Core-M's ascendancy over these is safe.