As you may have already read, one of Arm’s partners, Samsung, have recently announced their latest premium System on Chip (SOC), the Exynos 9810, expected to power this year’s flagship smartphones.
Built on the second generation of Samsung’s 10nm production process, 10LPP, for seamless multi-tasking, the Exynos 9810 has already been honourably mentioned in CES’s 2018 Innovation Awards. It features a cutting edge ‘ultra-fast gigabit LTE modem,’* simplifying the process of streaming or broadcasting 4K content or 360 video and boasts next-gen Machine Learning (ML) technology for smart image recognition and cataloguing. This can even use depth sensing to scan the user’s face in 3D, adding detail to face tracking filters as well as an added level of robustness to face recognition security software. This vital data is even secured separately from the rest of your information, making sure it’s harder than ever to gain unauthorised access to your device and details.
Enabling all these exciting developments is Samsung’s third generation, custom CPU. The four ‘high performance inbuilt cores can function at a super powerful 2.9GHz, with double the performance in a single-core and 40% more performance in a multi-core configuration. These gains are attributed to a combination of cache improvements and the new, wider pipelines. Paired with these four super-fast cores are four highly efficient Arm Cortex-A55 CPUs. These are designed to handle smaller, less demanding tasks at lower power usage, freeing up the more powerful cores to handle only the most demanding processes. Launched at Computex 2017, Cortex-A55 is based on Armv8.2 architecture and new, DynamIQ technology. It builds on the success of its predecessor, Cortex-A53, to significantly improve efficiency in order to support higher performance points at the same power consumption. Essentially, the Cortex-A55 provides a hefty 15% improvement in power efficiency, or can be tuned to deliver the same level of performance as the Cortex-A53 at an astonishing 30% lower power. This focus on sustained performance is especially important for today’s high intensity, complex use cases such as Virtual Reality and ML which push the thermal budget of a mobile device to its limits. These gains were achieved through advancements in the branch predictor, NEON and FP unit, as well as by reducing latency to memory, amongst other factors.
In today’s next generation smartphones, visuals are key. Samsung have leveraged this well, with the Exynos 9810 tipped to improve image and visual processing and support better quality, real time photography, reducing motion blur and providing exceptional visuals even in compromised lighting conditions. If you’ve read any of my previous blogs, you’ll know I’m something of a graphics geek, so it gives me great pleasure to highlight the inclusion of a whopping 18 core configuration of Mali-G72, Arm’s latest High Performance GPU also launched at Computex 2017. The superior ML capabilities of the Mali-G72 support Samsung’s claims of improved ML performance for Neural Network based deep learning and super speedy inference on device. Possibly the best news for Samsung though is that Mali-G72 has just been crowned “Best Processor IP” in Linley’s annual Group’s Analyst Choice Award 2017. Focused around areas such as performance, power, price, or die area; followed by market impact and innovation, the award examines all of the eligible candidates before establishing which represents the most impressive advancements of the past year. Mike Demler of Linley explained that:
In the case of Mali-G72, where we have actual production silicon performance reported on GFXBench, our consensus is that the new GPU offers such an impressive boost in performance for mobile processors that we chose it for Best Processor IP of 2017.
This award recognizes Arm’s continuous improvements in Graphics IP with the Mali range going from strength to strength in recent years, from becoming the world’s number one shipping GPU in 2015, to shipping a massive 1.2 BILLION units in 2017 alone. It’s great to see our partners continuing to take advantage of such fantastic IP in high profile, exciting chip designs. Now we wait with baited breath to see if the speculation is correct and this is indeed the chip that will power 2018’s Samsung Superphone.