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ARM's Impact on the Chip Market: 100M China-Designed SoCs Shipped in 2013

ARM’s Impact on the Chip Market: 100M China-Designed SoCs Shipped in 2013

At its second ever Tech Day, ARM shared a pretty interesting slide about its impact on the mobile SoC market. ARM’s business model allows for pretty much anyone to be a player in the SoC space. This is in stark contrast to the PC business that’s dominated by a single silicon player, with perhaps one lower volume second source. ARM’s IP licensing business has paved the way for a number of low cost SoC vendors, particularly those based in China, to enjoy substantial marketshare. While we’ve only reviewed a single MediaTek based device on AnandTech, the numbers out there are increasing tremendously. 

Tablets in particular are the perfect target for low cost SoCs given that you can successfully ship a WiFi-only design. ARM’s chart above shows just how successful its China-based SoC vendors have been in the tablet space, shipping over 100M SoCs in 2013 (~40% of ARM’s tablet business). 

ARM Shares Updated Cortex A53/A57 Performance Expectations
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ARM Shares Updated Cortex A53/A57 Performance Expectations

With the first Cortex A53 based SoCs due to ship in the coming months, and Cortex A57 based designs to follow early next year, ARM gave us a quick update on performance expectations for both cores. Given the timing of both designs we’ll see a combination of solutions built on presently available manufacturing processes (e.g. 28nm) as well as next gen offerings (20/16FF). The graph above gives us an updated look at performance expectations (in web browsing workloads) for both ARM 64-bit cores.

If we compare across the same process nodes (28nm in both cases), the Cortex A53 should give us nearly a 50% increase in performance compared to ARM’s Cortex A7. The Cortex A57 should offer roughly the same increase in performance compared to Cortex A15 as well. Although the A57 will do so at higher power, power efficiency may be better depending on the workload thanks to the added performance. Thankfully we won’t see many A57 designs built on 28nm in mobile (AMD’s first Cortex A57 design will be aimed at servers and is built on a 28nm process).

If you combine architectural improvements with a new process node, the gains are substantial. Move to 20nm or 16FF for these designs and the improvement over their 32-bit predecessors easily exceeds 50%. 

ARM also provided some Geekbench 3 performance data comparing the Cortex A57 to A15, both in 32-bit and 64-bit mode. We already know Geekbench 3 is particularly sensitive to the new instructions that come along with AArch64, but even in 32-bit mode there’s still a 15 – 30% increase in performance over the Cortex A15 at the same clocks.

Qualcomm has already announced its Snapdragon 410, 610 and 615 will use ARM’s Cortex A53, while its 808 and 810 will use a combination of Cortex A53s and A57s.

ARM Expects ~1B Entry Level Smartphones in 2018, $20 Smartphones Coming This Year
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ARM Expects ~1B Entry Level Smartphones in 2018, $20 Smartphones Coming This Year

When we first started covering mobile, nearly every silicon vendor I spoke with issued the same statement: eventually, all phones are smartphones. Continued scaling on process technology, combined continued development of small/power efficient CPU cores, will ensure that even the lowest cost mobile devices will be smartphones.

At its second ever Tech Day, ARM shared some data about how the smartphone market is evolving. We often mention that the growth in the smartphone industry will shift from high-end devices to mid-range and entry level devices. The graph above shows just that. By 2018 ARM expects over a billion entry level (< $150) smartphone shipments per year, around 2x what it is today.

Two factors will drive entry level shipments: the performance of entry-level devices, and their overall cost. ARM believes the floor for an entry level smartphone running Android (today with a single-core Cortex A5 based SoC) is $20, and that we’ll see the first devices on sale at that price point in the next few months. Manufacturing limits will likely prevent cost scaling below $20. Keep in mind that a single Cortex A5 is faster than the ARM11 in the original iPhone, which retailed for $599 in 2007.

ARM Shares Updated Cortex A53/A57 Performance Expectations

ARM Shares Updated Cortex A53/A57 Performance Expectations

With the first Cortex A53 based SoCs due to ship in the coming months, and Cortex A57 based designs to follow early next year, ARM gave us a quick update on performance expectations for both cores. Given the timing of both designs we’ll see a combination of solutions built on presently available manufacturing processes (e.g. 28nm) as well as next gen offerings (20/16FF). The graph above gives us an updated look at performance expectations (in web browsing workloads) for both ARM 64-bit cores.

If we compare across the same process nodes (28nm in both cases), the Cortex A53 should give us nearly a 50% increase in performance compared to ARM’s Cortex A7. The Cortex A57 should offer roughly the same increase in performance compared to Cortex A15 as well. Although the A57 will do so at higher power, power efficiency may be better depending on the workload thanks to the added performance. Thankfully we won’t see many A57 designs built on 28nm in mobile (AMD’s first Cortex A57 design will be aimed at servers and is built on a 28nm process).

If you combine architectural improvements with a new process node, the gains are substantial. Move to 20nm or 16FF for these designs and the improvement over their 32-bit predecessors easily exceeds 50%. 

ARM also provided some Geekbench 3 performance data comparing the Cortex A57 to A15, both in 32-bit and 64-bit mode. We already know Geekbench 3 is particularly sensitive to the new instructions that come along with AArch64, but even in 32-bit mode there’s still a 15 – 30% increase in performance over the Cortex A15 at the same clocks.

Qualcomm has already announced its Snapdragon 410, 610 and 615 will use ARM’s Cortex A53, while its 808 and 810 will use a combination of Cortex A53s and A57s.

AMD is also working on a new 64-bit x86 Core
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AMD is also working on a new 64-bit x86 Core

Jim Keller joined Mark Papermaster on stage at AMD’s Core Innovation Update press conference and added a few more details to AMD’s K12 announcement. Keller stressed AMD’s expertise in building high frequency cores, as well as marrying the strengths of AMD’s big cores with those of its low power cores. The resulting K12 core is a 64-bit ARM design, but Jim Keller also revealed that his team is working on a corresponding 64-bit x86 core.

The x86 counterpart doesn’t have a publicly known name at this point, but it is a new design built from the ground up.