New ARM cores announced

[dada_dave]

Overview from Anandtech:

Arm Unveils 2023 Mobile CPU Core Designs: Cortex-X4, A720, and A520 - the Armv9.2 Family

www.anandtech.com

Solid gains of 15-18% IPC, but we’ll see what actually gets implemented. I haven’t followed recently so I don’t know if it’s still a problem but implementation would sometimes suffer compared to “paper performance” - e.g. historically ARM would design cores with a range of possible cache sizes but Qualcomm et al would always go on the smaller side of cache, hurting performance on high end cores.

Will be interesting to see how they compare to Apple’s current generation offerings as well as its next generation of A/M processors.

 

[jbailey]

Since they are going with TSMC N3E we probably won’t see anything with these new designs until early-mid 2024.

 

[dada_dave]

Solid gains of 15-18% IPC, but we’ll see what actually gets implemented. I haven’t followed recently so I don’t know if it’s still a problem but implementation would sometimes suffer compared to “paper performance” - e.g. historically ARM would design cores with a range of possible cache sizes but Qualcomm et al would always go on the smaller side of cache, hurting performance on high end cores.

Interesting - not allowed to implement the low performance version on its own. Also once again a range of cache sizes are possible for any given design so we’ll see what implementations are actually actualized.

 

[Yoused]

… Arm also specifies that the Immortalis (10+ core GPU) must include a hardware ray-tracing unit. The major feature update in this generation is Deferred Vertex Shading (DVS). This appears to involve postponing most of the heavy rendering work until after the geometry processing is done, at which point any hidden surfaces can be discarded rather than being rendered. … Arm said that this was implemented to cope with the growing scene complexity of games … it requires 40 percent less memory bandwidth … the new GPU claimed to be 15 percent more energy efficient on average​

 

[dada_dave]

… Arm also specifies that the Immortalis (10+ core GPU) must include a hardware ray-tracing unit. The major feature update in this generation is Deferred Vertex Shading (DVS). This appears to involve postponing most of the heavy rendering work until after the geometry processing is done, at which point any hidden surfaces can be discarded rather than being rendered. … Arm said that this was implemented to cope with the growing scene complexity of games … it requires 40 percent less memory bandwidth … the new GPU claimed to be 15 percent more energy efficient on average​

So it’s similar to Apple/Imagination’s design now? @leman this might interest you. Also of course it will be interesting to see how their ray tracing stacks up

 

[leman]

So it’s similar to Apple/Imagination’s design now? @leman this might interest you. Also of course it will be interesting to see how their ray tracing stacks up

Sounds like TBDR, but hard to say without knowing more. The terminology has been used rather liberally