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  • Exophase - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    Wonderful article. Thank you very much for your time and information.
  • syxbit - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    Great answers!
    It's too bad none of the questions about A15 losing so badly to Krait and Cyclone weren't brought up.
  • ciplogic - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    It was about Cortex A53. Also, the answers were politically neutral (as they should), as the politics and other companies future development are not the engineer's talk. Maybe an engineer from Qualcomm could answer accurately.
  • lmcd - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    Krait 200 is way worse than A15. If A15 revisions come in then A15 could easily keep pace with Krait. But idk if ARM does those.

    Cyclone is an ARM Cortex-A57 competitor.
  • Wilco1 - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    A15 has much better IPC than Krait (which is why in the S4 Krait needs 2.3GHz to get the similar performance as A15 at just 1.6GHz). The only reason Krait can keep up at all is because it uses 28nm HPM, which allows for much higher frequencies.
  • ddriver - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    Really? The Note3 with krait is pretty much neck to neck with the exynos octa version at 1.9, which was a A15 design last time I checked.
  • Wilco1 - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    Sorry, it was 1.6 vs 1.9GHz in the S4 and 1.9 vs 2.3GHz in the Note3. Both are pretty much matched on performance, so Krait needs ~20% higher clock.
  • cmikeh2 - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    I don't know if those are normalized for actual power consumption, although we have to deal with different process technologies as well. Good IPC is pretty much meaningless in this segment if it requires ridiculous voltages to hit the frequencies it needs to.
  • Wilco1 - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link

    It does seem Samsung had some issues with its process indeed. NVidia was able to reach higher frequencies easily at low power. I haven't seen detailed power consumption comparisons between the 2 variants of S4 and N3 at load, but there certainly is a power cost to pushing your CPU to high frequencies (high voltages indeed!), so having better IPC helps.
  • twotwotwo - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    Not even sure I'd count A15 out yet. I have a vague that impression power draw is part of why it didn't get more wins; if so, the next process gen might help with that. Folks on AT will have moved on to thinking about 64-bit chips by then, but as Peter put it there will be plenty of lower-end sockets left to fill.

    Also, there was an A15 in the most popular ARM laptop yet (the Exynos in the Chromebook) so at least it got one really neat win. :)
  • twotwotwo - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    Really awesome. Interesting to hear there're 16nm ARM implementations (faancy) and to hear that three of the ARM in-order architectures were about equal in work/watt and why. Peter deserves some kind of medal for enduring so many of our goofy questions (including mine) and answering as much as possible. Does AT give the Gold Award to people?
  • twotwotwo - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    Ah, here's that 16nm chip: http://www.tsmc.com/tsmcdotcom/PRListingNewsAction...
  • stevekgoodwin - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    Very interesting, but too short. More, please. Can Peter write an article for Anandtech? Maybe something about older ARM products would be easier for his people to agree to.
  • twotwotwo - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    Or just tell us why he found the Alpha EV6 cool :)
  • Death666Angel - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    Found a typo I think:
    "For example, Cortex-A7 supports the same bus-interface standards (and widths) as Cortex-A7 which allows a partner who has already built a Cortex-A7 platform to rapidly convert to Cortex-A53."
    One of those first two "A7" should be "A53" or that sentence doesn't make much sense to me. :)
    Some really interesting answers, thanks for doing this!
  • melgross - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    The answers he did give were great, but it's too bad he chose to not answer some of the more interesting. I understand there are political issues with some questions, but others would have been nice.

    I imagine that some came too close to a roadmap question, and so couldn't be answered for competitive reasons.
  • hlovatt - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link

    Really great that Peter spent the time to answer these questions. So when is it Intel's turn :)
  • Try-Catch-Me - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link

    Wow. I feel honoured to have my question answered!
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  • TamaraJKent - Tuesday, December 24, 2013 - link

    hi

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