Gadgetory

hello my name is Gary Sims from Android Authority now arms current leading processor design is the cortex a 72 and we find it in system on chips like the quirian 952 q95 which we find in phones like the Huawei mate 8 and the wildly p9 also called Karma using it in some of their mid-range chips now today arm have announced the cortex a7 t3 so what does the a 73 bring to the table how is it different to the cortex a7 t2 but let me explain when you use your smartphone the CPU is running and it produces heat and the amount of heat it produces as a function of the voltage and of the frequency and of the chip design and basically that heat is dissipated through the phone itself now when you do something like open an app or read a web page the CPU usage will peak momentarily just for a few seconds and then it will drop down again as the app opens or as the webpage is rendered and then while you're reading the web page the CPU can be running at a very low level and that's absolutely normal and that's absolutely fine and the amount of heat it produces during that peak doesn't really matter because only doing it for a few seconds and the phone very easily dissipates that heat through is chassis and through the body of the phone now when you start doing something complicated with your phone that heat starts to build up and the more it builds up the more heat has to be dissipated through the body of the phone and you've says that yourself you might be holding your phone you might feel warm to the touch at the back and that's the heat being dissipated because unlike desktops a mobile phone or smartphone doesn't have a heat sink and a cooler and a big fan that's running on the back of it it's all just passive heat dissipation now basically what happens is when you start running your phone at a high workload for a long period of time the heat is going out through the phone gets to a saturation point and it can't dissipate any more heat so therefore if you keep adding heat the phone will just get hotter and hotter and hotter and in fact it will become uncomfortable in the Hang now when it gets at that point the Linux kernel knows what's going on and it will actually bring down the amount of heat being produced by your CPU and it does that using a thing called throttling it will bring down the frequency it may even bring down some things like the voltages so that the heat being produced by the CPU is less and gives the chassis the body of the photo chance to get rid of the heat that it already has and then if later on it finds it it actually has a spare capacity more heat can be produced it will ramp up the CP usage again now this is really interesting because what happens when it's rotted when it brings down the heat it actually brings down the performance so when we run a benchmark them we all run benchmark so I run them to test phones as well but when we run a benchmark we often do in the phone is cold and it runs and it can produce a peak level of performance for a short amount of time and how long do these benchmarks take to run a few seconds 30 seconds a minute and then that's it they're over now of course what happens if you're doing it that benchmark time and time and time again or you're playing a game for a long period of time we were doing lots of calculations for a long period of time the performance will actually drop now here's the thing about the cortex a 73 the amount of heat it produces during its peak performance level just those few seconds it using it and the matter heater produces with a sustained level of workload is almost exactly the same and we've never seen anything like this in a smartphone chip before always there's been an overhead where the CPU can hit a peak and produce more heat just for a short amount of time but when it comes to its sustained level it has to be much lower but with the Quartus a 73 they are the same thing and that is really an amazing thing for designers because first of all it means that the amount of heat is going to be produced by this CPU is constant and that may give way to new designs and new ways to make mobile phone make smart phones the materials that are used where the the CPU is placed on the circuit boards on because now the CPU designer knows that this level is always going to be constant and it also means that when we're playing games when we're using the app of the apps that our CPU intensive actually the performance won't drop it will actually stay the same after the first minute and after 30 minutes we should be getting the same level of performance and that's something we haven't seen before in a mobile system-on-a-chip now before I go any further there are a few caveats the cpu we're talking about the CPU here is only one part on a system on a chip the GPU is another important part Nick produces a significant amount of heat as well and their other component as well let the modems and the ISPs and the DSPs and the memory controllers and they all produce an amount of heat as well now if you've got a very efficient CPU but the GPU is producing lots of heat the CPU will end up still being throttled because it's the overall heat that is the issue here so that's a caveat we are just talking about the CPU here and not about the GPU and other parts that go with it and there are of course other other technologies that can be used to bring down the heat including big.little which incorporates more power efficient CPU cores with high-performance CPU cores there's also things like the intelligent power allocation algorithm that's now in the mainstream Linux kernel which means that if the CPU has is running and it's not using all of its performers in some of that heat allocation that thermal budget can be given over to the GPU so the overall temperature can rise to its maximum now in terms of the actual design of the cortex a 72 I won't go into it too much here in this video there are some interesting things like it uses now a 64 K instruction cache things like that you can go over and read the article that I've written over and wrote accom if those things are of interest to you however what will be of interest to you is what's called the process note that each chip is made using silicon using transistors and the idea is the smaller the gap between the transistors and the smaller the transistors the more efficient the chip can be now today's modern chips that we find in the galaxy s7 both the Qualcomm and the Samsung variants are built using a 16 nanometer process and arm have already announced that they are working on a test chip at 10 nanometers and is expected that the cortex a7 t3 will be able to be built at 10 nanometers however it can also be built at 60 nanometers in fact you could probably also be built at 28 nanometers if that's what silicon vendors warmth it so let me throw some numbers at you if it's built at 60 nanometers like the current pro tips of today like the Kirin 950 in the queuing 9/5 then the cortex a 73 is 10 to 15 percent faster than the cortex a 72 is a 10 percent performance boost but yet a sustained level of performance throughout the whole working life time of a program it doesn't dip after a few minutes now also it's built on the same 16 enemy to process it produces 20% less heat now that means that components like the GPU can be given a bit more of a thermal budget so they can run faster and they can produce more high performance 3d graphics now when the court is a team industry is built using a 10 nanometer process and arm already proved they can do that you'll find an article over at the and rolls-royce comm website which talks about a chip that they've made with codename Artemis and we now know that Artemis is in fact the cortex a 73 on a 10 nanometer process the a 73 is 30% faster than the a 72 and it's 30% more efficient than the a 72 so that means when we start to see the system on our chips for VA 73 they're going to be faster they're going to be cooler and when you run them for a long period of time their performance is not going to drop because the heat output is going to remain the same now those are some pretty important things now when will we see systems on a chips with the cortex a 73 well of course arm is already working with its partners you can be get pretty much guaranteeing that they were already working on system on a chips that will have the 873 in it and arm already made the test chip and that test chip data will be sent on to its partners so they can get really quick as they can to getting chips out now there is possibility that we may even see some phones with the quarters a 73 in it by the end of this year but if not the end of this year certainly in 2017 personally I'm quite looking forward to seeing the a 73 in action good to bench market and to see its heat output when those phones become available now as I'm sure you know it's very popular for CPUs to have eight cores in them now some of those eight core processors have four cortex a53 calls and then four cortex 857 or four cores it's a 72 calls big door little however there are a whole bunch of mid-range phones that just use 8 cores of the same type and that's normally the cortex a53 and some of them might be clock did they say 1.5 gigahertz and some might be clocked at let's say 1 gigahertz so it's kind of a big dot little arrangement but using the same cortex core now what's really interesting about the cortex a 72 is that it's a high-performance core but they've actually managed to make it significantly smaller and it's now come to the point where actually it would be just about the same silicon area to produce a hexa core processor with 4 cortex a53 cores and 2 cortex a seventy three cores in the same system on which it will take about the same space as an octa-core a53 chip now why that's important is because for these silicon vendors the amount of silicon space is where they make their money it cost millions of dollars to produce the first chip and then they have to produce millions of them to get their money back now a silicon cost money and for every little square millimeter of silicon that isn't included they can make some more profit now if these manufacturers actually get around to making hexa core chips with 2 cords a 73's and 4 cortex a53 they will actually see a 90% boost in single thread performance so that means doing certain activities like scrolling on a webpage or even loading a webpage will actually be significantly faster because the single thread speed is better and as for multi thread speed that will actually be 30% better so that's going to be an interesting development for 2017 well my name's Gary Sims from Andrew authority and I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up also don't forget to connect with me over the Android or thority with the forums you can use this link here to go and speak to me we can talk about any quarters AMD 3 when you look at GPUs we can talk about any other 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