Arm has just published a roadmap for their Cortex-A processors until 2020, where we can see 7nm Deimos, and 7 to 5 nm Hercules succeeding Arm Cortex A76 core with “laptop class performance” announced last spring. For reference, an Arm Cortex A76 @ 3 GHz is said to outperform an Intel Core i5-7300U (15W TDP) processor at a lower power envelop.
The two new Cortex-A cores will offer better better performance, will be launched in 2019 and 2020respectively, and as we’ll see below Arm expects those core to outperform Intel Core i5 processors.
Current Arm laptop based on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 have generally been disappointing in terms of performance, especially considering the prices those are sold for, but after a big jump on performance for Cortex A76 cores, Arm expects a 15% increase in compute performance per year. Hercules is expected to be around 2.5 times faster than current Arm Cortex A72/A73 cores.
The chart also shows a faster progression of Arm cores against Intel 15W TDP parts, although what the latter plans to launch by 2020 is not represented in the chart. We’ll have to wait and see.
All new cores from Cortex-A76 to Hercules target SoCs for devices with always-on always-connected 5G connectivity. There should be around a one year delay between a processor launch, and actual product launches. So we can expect Deimos based laptops in 2020, and Hercules devices one year later. We’ll also have to wait longer before getting some technical details about Deimos and Hercules cores.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Ambitious. It will be more than curious to see if Arm manage to achieve the target performance levels of their incoming designs. Regardless, I commend their course of movement (time for A76 to show up on devboards already! : )
Will A76 meet the hype?
https://community.arm.com/processors/b/blog/posts/cortex-a76-laptop-class-performance-with-mobile-efficiency
maybe when ARM will be able to get 3GHz and more on all big cores
as intel core is able to get 3-4GHz only on one core as they generate to much heat
for example A73 on HiKey970 is runny fine on 2,4GHz and it is really beast but SOC has RAM on the top so whole heat need to pass from SOC to RAM and then to heatsink. So I can Imagine 3GHz and more without any problem with proper heatpipes
Apple will show ARM beast with some high freq. in some device and everybody will follow.
Wonder if for desktop and TV use if it is time arm A76 embraced heatsink with fan. Not 12v fans you don’t need them for home or office, lower voltage quiet fans.
The current Cortex-A75 based “Windows for ARM” laptops disappoint mainly because of Windows and the Win32 emulation that results in a huge performance hit.
I am quite sure that an quad- Cortex-A75 based Linux laptop with fast SSD and good thermal headroom would perform beautifully with native LibreOffice and other desktop Linux apps.
The PostmarketOS folks are already targeting SD845 smartphones so you can stick one of those in a lapdock and see what happens: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/96z2uv/librem_5_dev_images_running_on_the_xperia_z2/e44xpa6/
Personally i’m holding off for something like a Chromebook before looking further into how well Freedreno covers the new SoCs. But yeah. Overall I agree the new SoCs have the compute and graphics power to pull it off and it’s really just a question of software.
An SD845 chromebook is coming (codenamed ‘cheza’), and chromeOS is expected to get its linuxapp KVM official support soon, so we will be able to see how SD845 performs as a linux desktop/notebook.
Never, never, never, never, never ARM will perform not even close to a desktop x86 computer from 5 years ago regarding win32 emulation. Stop that way NOW.
A76 should be used for Linux desktop with very polished GPU drivers 🙂