Arm Announces Mobile Armv9 CPU Microarchitectures: Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710 & Cortex-A510
by Andrei Frumusanu on May 25, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SoCs
- CPUs
- Arm
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- Cortex
- ARMv9
- Cortex-X2
- Cortex-A710
- Cortex-A510
The Cortex-X2: More Performance, Deeper OoO
We first start off with the Cortex-X2, successor to last year’s Cortex-X1. The X1 marked the first in a new IP line-up from Arm which diverged its “big” core offering into two different IP lines, with the Cortex-A sibling continuing Arm’s original design philosophy of PPA, while the X-cores are allowed to grow in size and power in order to achieve much higher performance points.
The Cortex-X2 continues this philosophy, and further grows the performance and power gap between it and its “middle” sibling, the Cortex-A710. I also noticed that throughout Arm’s presentation there were a lot more mentions of having the Cortex-X2 being used in larger-screen compute devices and form-factors such as laptops, so it might very well be an indication of the company that some of its customers will be using the X2 more predominantly in such designs for this generation.
From an architectural standpoint the X2 is naturally different from the X1, thanks in large part to its support for Armv9 and all of the security and related ISA platform advancements that come with the new re-baselining of the architecture.
As noted in the introduction, the Cortex-X2 is also a 64-bit only core which only supports AArch64 execution, even in PL0 user mode applications. From a microarchitectural standpoint this is interesting as it means Arm will have been able to kick out some cruft in the design. However as the design is a continuation of the Austin family of processors, I do wonder if we’ll see more benefits of this deprecation in future “clean-sheet” big cores designs, where AArch64-only was designed from the get-go. This, in fact, is something that's already happening in other members of Arm's CPU cores, as the new little core Cortex-A510 was designed sans-AArch32.
Starting off with the front-end, in general, Arm has continued to try to improve what it considers the most important aspect of the microarchitecture: branch prediction. This includes continuing to run the branch resolution in a decoupled way from the fetch stages in order to being able to have these functional blocks be able to run ahead of the rest of the core in case of mispredicts and minimize branch bubbles. Arm generally doesn’t like to talk too much details about what exactly they’ve changed here in terms of their predictors, but promises a notable improvement in terms of branch prediction accuracy for the new X2 and A710 cores, effectively reducing the MPKI (Misses per kilo instructions) metric for a very wide range of workloads.
The new core overall reduces its pipeline length from 11 cycles to 10 cycles as Arm has been able to reduce the dispatch stages from 2-cycles to 1-cycle. It’s to be noted that we have to differentiate the pipeline cycles from the mispredict penalties, the latter had already been reduced to 10 cycles in most circumstances in the Cortex-A77 design. Removing a pipeline stage is generally a rather large change, particularly given Arm’s target of maintaining frequency capabilities of the core. This design change did incur some more complex engineering and had area and power costs; but despite that, as Arm explains in, cutting a pipeline stage still offered a larger return-on-investment when it came to the performance benefits, and was thus very much worth it.
The core also increases its out-of-order capabilities, increasing the ROB (reorder buffer) by 30% from 224 entries to 288 entries this generation. The effective figure is actually a little bit higher still, as in cases of compression and instruction bundling there are essentially more than 288 entries being stored. Arm says there’s also more instruction fusion cases being facilitated this generation.
On the back-end of the core, the big new change is on the part of the FP/ASIMD pipelines which are now SVE2-capable. In the mobile space, the SVE vector length will continue to be 128b and essentially the new X2 core features similar throughput characteristics to the X1’s 4x FP/NEON pipelines. The choice of 128b vectors instead of something higher is due to the requirement to have homogenous architectural feature-sets amongst big.LITTLE designs as you cannot mix different vector length microarchitectures in the same SoC in a seamless fashion.
On the back-end, the Cortex-X2 continues to focus on increasing MLP (memory level parallelism) by increasing the load-store windows and structure sizes by 33%. Arm here employs several structures and generally doesn’t go into detail about exactly which queues have been extended, but once we get our hands on X2 systems we’ll be likely be able to measure this. The L1 dTLB has grown from 40 entries to 48 entries, and as with every generation, Arm has also improved their prefetchers, increasing accuracies and coverage.
One prefetcher that surprised us in the Cortex-X1 and A78 earlier this year when we first tested new generation devices was a temporal prefetcher – the first of its kind that we’re aware of in the industry. This is able to latch onto arbitrary repeated memory patterns and recognize new iterations in memory accesses, being able to smartly prefetch the whole pattern up to a certain depth (we estimate a 32-64MB window). Arm states that this coverage is now further increased, as well as the accuracy – though again the details we’ll only able to see once we get our hands on silicon.
In terms of IPC improvements, this year’s figures are quoted to reach +16% in SPECint2006 at ISO frequency. The issue with this metric (and which applies to all of Arm’s figures today) is that Arm is comparing an 8MB L3 cache design to a 4MB L3 design, so I expect a larger chunk of that +16% figure to be due to the larger cache rather than the core IPC improvements themselves.
For their part, Arm is reiterating that they're expecting 8MB L3 designs for next year’s X2 SoCs – and thus this +16% figure is realistic and is what users should see in actual implementations. But with that said, we had the same discussion last year in regards to Arm expecting 8MB L3 caches for X1 SoCs, which didn't happen for either the Exynos 2100 nor the Snapdragon 888. So we'll just have to wait and see what cache sizes the flagship commercial SoCs end up going with.
In terms of the performance and power curve, the new X2 core extends itself ahead of the X1 curve in both metrics. The +16% performance figure in terms of the peak performance points, though it does come at a cost of higher power consumption.
Generally, this is a bit worrying in context of what we’re seeing in the market right now when it comes to process node choices from vendors. We’ve seen that Samsung’s 5LPE node used by Qualcomm and S.LSI in the Snapdragon 888 and Exynos 2100 has under-delivered in terms of performance and power efficiency, and I generally consider both big cores' power consumption to be at a higher bound limit when it comes to thermals. I expect Qualcomm to stick with Samsung foundry in the next generation, so I am admittedly pessimistic in regards to power improvements in whichever node the next flagship SoCs come in (be it 5LPP or 4LPP). It could well be plausible that we wouldn’t see the full +16% improvement in actual SoCs next year.
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Thala - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
You compare only peak performance. ARM has demonstrated that SVE2 can have big advantages over NEON, in particular for computational kernel, which does not parallelize well for NEON.WorBlux - Thursday, May 27, 2021 - link
>If they are sticking with in-order, I hoped the A510 could’ve done something more over four years.In order is hard. The A55 was pretty cool in allowing certain instruction dependencies to be issued together. The traditional way to get more IPC out of in-order is VLIW, but would require an ABI break or at least a special sort of compiler optimization and quasi-long-words that in the end wouldn't do any better than the A55/A510 on legacy and non-optimized code.
mode_13h - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
x86 is indeed on the way out, but your analysis is too facile.SarahKerrigan - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
Essentially agreed.yeeeeman - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
x86 maybe dead if you don't understand how and why things stand like they do.First of all, Apple is in a very very special situation where they control everything. Hardware, software, product. Plus they use the best process there is at the moment. All of this, contributes to their results. Which are very good, but they stem from what I told you.
Now, a better picture of what ARM is actually capable of in ... real life is the snapdragon 8cx, which for all intents and purposes is still alive only because qualcomm has a ton of money and can throw it away for projects that don't really sell.
Apple is using just ARM ISA. If Apple has great performance and great efficiency, it doesn't mean automatically that ARM and the companies that work with them will also reach that point. The truth is, Apple has put a LOT of money and R&D and got the best talents there are to get where they are today. Their cores are not exactly suited for the plethora of android devices that range from 50 bucks to 2000+.
Now, regarding x86, if you compare amd's zen 3 with m1, you'll see that they are not that far off, in perf and in efficiency. And AMD is using 7nm, not 5nm! Also, nowdays, all the cpus are risc inside, so x86 cpus are very similar inside to arm cpus, with the addition of the extra decoding and micro ops.
x86 main weakness is also its greatest advantage. Backwards compatibility is very important and needs to stay. ARM cpus lose compatibility totally once in a while, which is not something that will work in the long run.
Also, don't forget that Intel hasn't introduced anything major since 2015! Ice Lake/Tigerlake are just a bump in execution units over skylake, which on its own brings 20% better IPC. But Intel has stayed still for so many years, that is why ARM has got the chance to close the gap.
SarahKerrigan - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
What? SNC is not merely a bump in execution units from SKL at all. It's a new, wider, more aggressive uarch across the board. SNC is a larger change than SKL itself was, and not by a small margin.boredsysadmin - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
@yeeeeman - "Also, nowdays, all the cpus are risc inside, so x86 cpus are very similar inside to arm cpus, with the addition of the extra decoding and micro ops."Excuse, where did you get this BS? Only Arm, Risk-V, MIPS, and PowerPC are using RISC. x86 from both Intel and AMD are very much still CISC. So, no they aren't very similar in any share and form.
Drumsticks - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
All x86 CPUs crack CISC macro instructions into smaller RISC like operations. The actual execution of the CPU operates on these smaller micro ops. Beyond the initial decode/cracking stage, it's pretty much a RISC operation.They are CISC from an architectural perspective, but they've been RISC in execution for some time.
vvid - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
>> All x86 CPUs crack CISC macro instructions into smaller RISC like operations.RISC-like is not RISC. It is like saying that a woman with pear-like figure shape is actually a pear.
x86 uops are pretty much corresponding to CISC ISA now.
>> but they've been RISC in execution for some time
RISC-like.
mode_13h - Wednesday, May 26, 2021 - link
> they've been RISC in execution for some time.And sadly, Internet Oversimplification Syndrome claims another victim.