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ARM Launches Juno
ARM has announced two programs to assist Android’s ascent into the 64-bit architecture market.
The first of those is Linaro, a port of the Android Open Source Project to the 64-bit ARMv8-A architecture. ARM said the port was done on a development board codenamed “Juno”, which is the second initiative to help Android reach the 64-bit market.
The Juno hardware development platform includes a system on chip (SoC) powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU and dual-core ARM Cortex-A57 CPU in an ARM big.little processing configuration.
Juno is said to be an “open, vendor neutral ARMv8 development platform” that will also feature an ARM Mali-T624 graphics processor.
Alongside the news of the 64-bit initiatives, ARM also announced that Actions Semiconductor of China signed a license agreement for the 64-bit ARM Cortex-A50 processor family.
“Actions provides SoC solutions for portable consumer electronics,” ARM said. “With this IP license, Actions will develop 64-bit SoC solutions targeting the tablet and over-the-counter (OTT) set top box markets.”
The announcements from ARM come at an appropriate time, as it was only last week that Google announced the latest version of its Android mobile operating system, Android L, which comes with support for 64-bit processors. ARM’s latest developments mean that Android developers are likely to take advantage of them in the push to take Android to the 64-bit market.
Despite speculation that it would launch as Android 5.0 Lollipop, Google outed its next software iteration on Wednesday last week as simply Android L, touting the oddly-named iteration as “the largest update to the operating system yet”.
ARM To Focus On 64-bit SoC
ARM announced its first 64-bit cores a while ago and SoC makers have already rolled out several 64-bit designs. However, apart from Apple nobody has consumer oriented 64-bit ARM devices on the market just yet. They are slowly starting to show up and ARM says the transition to 64-bit parts is accelerating. However, the first wave of 64-bit ARM parts is not going after the high-end market.
Is 64-bit support on entry-level SoCs just a gimmick?
This trend raises a rather obvious question – are low end ARMv8 parts just a marketing gimmick, or do they really offer a significant performance gain? There is no straight answer at this point. It will depend on Google and chipmakers themselves, as well as phonemakers.
Qualcomm announced its first 64-bit part late last year. The Snapdragon 410 won’t turn many heads. It is going after $150 phones and it is based on Cortex A53 cores. It also has LTE, which makes it rather interesting.
MediaTek is taking a similar approach. Its quad-core MT6732 and octa-core MT6752 parts are Cortex A53 designs, too. Both sport LTE connectivity.
Qualcomm and MediaTek appear to be going after the same market – $100 to $150 phones with LTE and quad-core 64-bit stickers on the box. Marketers should like the idea, as they’re getting a few good buzzwords for entry-level gear.
However, we still don’t know much about their real-world performance. Don’t expect anything spectacular. The Cortex A53 is basically the 64-bit successor to the frugal Cortex A7. The A53 has a bit more cache, 40-bit physical addresses and it ends up a bit faster than the A7, but not by much. ARM says the A7 delivers 1.9DMIPS/MHz per core, while the A53 churns out 2.3DMIPS/MHz. That puts it in the ballpark of the good old Cortex A9. The first consumer oriented quad-core Cortex A9 part was Nvidia’s Tegra 3, so in theory a Cortex A53 quad-core could be as fast as a Tegra 3 clock-for-clock, but at 28nm we should see somewhat higher clocks, along with better graphics.
That’s not bad for $100 to $150 devices. LTE support is just the icing on the cake. Keep in mind that the Cortex A7 is ARM’s most efficient 32-bit core, hence we expect nothing less from the Cortex A53.
The Cortex A57 conundrum
Speaking to CNET’s Brooke Crothers, ARM executive vice president of corporate strategy Tom Lantzsch said the company was surprised by strong demand for 64-bit designs.
“Certainly, we’ve had big uptick in demand for mobile 64-bit products. We’ve seen this with our [Cortex] A53, a high-performance 64-bit mobile processor,” Lantzch told CNET.
He said ARM has been surprised by the pace of 64-bit adoption, with mobile parts coming from Qualcomm, MediaTek and Marvell. He said he hopes to see 64-bit phones by Christmas, although we suspect the first entry-level products will appear much sooner.
Lantzsch points out that even 32-bit code will run more efficiently on 64-bit ARMv8 parts. As software support improves, the performance gains will become more evident.
But where does this leave the Cortex A57? It is supposed to replace the Cortex A15, which had a few teething problems. Like the A15 it is a relatively big core. The A15 was simply too big and impractical on the 32nm node. On 28nm it’s better, but not perfect. It is still a huge core and its market success has been limited.
As a result, it’s highly unlikely that we will see any 28nm Cortex A57 parts. Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 810 is the first consumer oriented A57 SoC. It is a 20nm design and it is coming later this year, just in time for Christmas as ARM puts it. However, although the Snapdragon 810 will be ready by the end of the year, the first phones based on the new chip are expected to ship in early 2015.
While we will be able to buy 64-bit Android (and possibly Windows Phone) devices before Christmas, most if not all of them will be based on the A53. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Consumers won’t have to spend $500 to get a 64-bit ARM device, so the user base could start growing long before high-end parts start shipping, thus forcing developers and Google to speed up 64-bit development.
If rumors are to be believed, Google is doing just that and it is not shying away from small 64-bit cores. The search giant is reportedly developing a $100 Nexus phone for emerging markets. It is said to be based on MediaTek’s MT6732 clocked at 1.5GHz. Sounds interesting, provided the rumour turns out to be true.
AMC Goes To The Clouds
Applied Micro Circuits has released its cloud chip which takes networking and computing and crams it all onto one SoC.
The X-Gene server on a chip, is being billed as the first 64-bit-capable ARM-based server in existence. According to the company it is the first chip to contain a software-defined network (SDN) controller on the die that will offer network services such as load balancing and ensuring service-level agreements on the chip.
Paramesh Gopi, president and CEO of Applied Micro, said that these new chips have now made it past the prototype stage and are being used by Dell and Red Hat. Gopi expects physical servers containing the X-Gene to hit the market by the end of this year.
The chip is manufactured at 40 nanometers and has eight 2.4 GHz ARM cores, four smaller ARM Cortex A5 cores running the SDN controller software, four 10-gigabit ethernet ports, and various ports that can support more Ethernet, SSDs, accelerator cards such as those from Fusion-io or SATA drives.
The cost of ownership, which includes power requirements are about half of that of a comparable x86 product, but wouldn’t discuss actual power consumption, the company claims.
ARM Goes High-End
Nvidia is itself an ARM chip licensee that has seen significant design wins with its Tegra 3 system-on-chip (SoC) processor, however the firm doesn’t see ARM based servers being able to do heavy lifting in server tasks for two years. Sumit Gupta, GM of Nvidia’s Tesla Accelerated Computing business unit said that even with GPGPUs, ARM based servers are not yet able to provide the computing power needed to drive high performance servers.
Gupta said, “Performance of these ARM cores is still not where it needs to be for servers. It is getting there; the new ARM64 [processor] is going to get it part of the way.” However he did say that eventually ARM SoCs could hit X86-like performance levels. “One day I think ARM will at least get to similar performance levels as X86 performance. The belief is that over the next one or two years these ARM SoCs will be good enough for cloud applications and web serving. I think it will take some more time to be good enough for accelerated computing.”
As for Nvidia using its Tegra chips to push work to the firm’s GPGPUs, a scenario that would make the firm’s accountants very happy, Gupta said he was surprised at the level of interest from developers and questioned the need for powerful CPUs. “We did a small development kit called Karma that has a Tegra 3 and a Nvidia GPU, [and] I was shocked by the number of those kits that have been sold. The interest in this ARM plus GPU is far larger than even I expected. If the GPU can do dynamic parallelism, it becomes more independent than how powerful CPUs do you need? I believe the first thing that will happen is that people will start using lower performing [Intel] Xeons […] then at some point when these Atom based processors become available they might use that, and when ARM64 is available they’ll use that.”