A72. 3.5 times faster?

Posted:
in Future Apple Hardware edited May 2015

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2879037/arm-launches-cortex-a-72-platform-powering-flagship-smartphones-in-2016.html

 

All eyes maybe on Skylake...

 

However, the next Arm onslaught is being 'quietly' ushered in?  3.5 times performance increase and a significant power savings brought to the table.

 

In terms of closing the gap with intel, what does this mean for iOS and potential Mac (A series CPU)  design.

 

What will the Geekbench score be?

 

Lemon Bon Bon.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3

    ...and those GPU increases are coming along as well.  

     

    4k streaming at 120fps for a mobile phone/tablet?  This is when TVs are only just going 4k and monitors are only just going 4k with 60 fps for casual viewers and content creators?

     

    Lemon Bon Bon.

  • Reply 2 of 3
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    Interesting article but I'm not sure it means much in the context of Apples devices. Apple uses the ARM instruction set but there are real questions as to how much of the hardware architecture is actually ARM's and how much is Apple. The cores could be fully custom Apple cores and considering how quickly Apples 64 bit chips came to market there is a good possibility that Apple was working on the architecture concurrently with ARM designing its first hardware translation.
    Since I don't expect to see another computer purchase this year, I'm slowly loosing interest in SkyLake. However an iPhone or maybe an iPad might happen thus an interest in all things ARM. I can see Apple only increasing their interest in ARM and the A series as it is the only way that they can control their destiny.
    However, the next Arm onslaught is being 'quietly' ushered in?  3.5 times performance increase and a significant power savings brought to the table.

    In terms of closing the gap with intel, what does this mean for iOS and potential Mac (A series CPU)  design.
    Well we can assume that Apple will go after performance yet again but there is also a possibility that this go around will be an integration effort with less of a focus on higher performance. By this I mean I can see Apple using up a lot of die space ring on board as much of the external circuitry as possible. We could see Apple custom LTE hardware (modem chip) this year for example, embedded right in to the A series chip. We will get better performance almost by default with a process shrink and maybe more GPU and CPU cores but I don't expect an explosion here.

    What will the Geekbench score be?

    Lemon Bon Bon.

    I'm not even going to guess as to a Geekbench score but they would be fast. Probably in the range of low end laptop chips. By the way the current A series isn't far from laptop range as it is. Laptops have a big advantage with frequency scaling which the A series don't use at the moment. As such we really don't know what the max clock rate is on Apples A series chips. I just see good things a coming.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    ...and those GPU increases are coming along as well.  

    4k streaming at 120fps for a mobile phone/tablet?  This is when TVs are only just going 4k and monitors are only just going 4k with 60 fps for casual viewers and content creators?

    Lemon Bon Bon.

    I see 4K tablets as being hard to justify right now. What would make such chips interesting though is to place them in set top boxes or home theater PC's. One of the things that bugs me about Apple is that they pass up the opportunity to get away from Intel by producing an Apple TV that is so locked down.

    Just imagine a Apple TV sized box with one of these chips in it. You would get performance better that a desktop from not to far back in history, all at substantially lower power levels. By the way that is desktop performance with a GPU that radical outclasses anything in a mainstream PC a decade ago. It might not be a replacement for todays desktop PC's but I can see hundreds of uses for a low cost and more importantly a very low power machine like this. Hell the whole PC could be built into something like one of Apples laptop power adapters. Just plug it in wherever you need a little bit of computational power. The whole thing might burn a couple of watts full bore (less that a child's night light) and milliwatts idle.

    My imagination just runs wild here at the potential ARM offers up.
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