2019 was a great year for Arm. On the mobile side of things one could say it was business as usual, as the company continued to see successes with its Cortex cores, particularly the new Cortex-A77 which we’ve now seen employed in flagship chipsets such as the Snapdragon 865. The bigger news for the company over the past year however hasn’t been in the mobile space, but rather in the server space, where one can today rent Neoverse-N1 CPUs such as Amazon’s impressive Graviton2 chip, with more vendors such as Ampere expected to release their server products soon.

While the Arm server space is truly taking off as we speak, aiming to compete against AMD and Intel, Arm hasn't reached the pinnacle of the mobile market – at least, not yet. Arm’s mobile Cortex cores have lived in the shadow of Apple’s custom CPU microarchitectures over the past several years, as Apple has seemingly always managed to beat Cortex designs by significant amounts. While there’s certainly technical reasons to the differences – it was also a lot due to business rationale on Arm’s side.

Today for Arm’s 2020 TechDay announcements, the company is not just releasing a single new CPU microarchitecture, but two. The long-expected Cortex-A78 is indeed finally making an appearance, but Arm is also introducing its new Cortex-X1 CPU as the company’s new flagship performance design. The move is not only surprising, but marks an extremely important divergence in Arm’s business model and design methodology, finally addressing some of the company’s years-long product line compromises.

The New Cortex-A78: Doubling Down on Efficiency

The new Cortex-A78 isn’t exactly a big surprise – Arm had first publicly divulged the Hercules codename over two years ago when they had presented the company’s performance roadmap through 2020. Two years later, and here we are, with the Cortex-A78 representing the third iteration of Arm’s new Austin-family CPU microarchitecture, which had started from scratch with the Cortex-A76.

The new Cortex-A78 pretty much continues Arm’s traditional design philosophy, that being that it’s built with a stringent focus on a balance between performance, power, and area (PPA). PPA is the name of the game for the wider industry, and here Arm is pretty much the leading player on the scene, having been able to provide extremely competitive performance at with low power consumption and small die areas. These design targets are the bread & butter of Arm as the company has an incredible range of customers who aim for very different product use-cases – some favoring performance while some other have cost as their top priority.

All in all (we’ll get into the details later), the Cortex-A78 promises a 20% improvement in sustained performance under an identical power envelope. This figure is meant to be a product performance projection, combining the microarchitecture’s improvements as well as the upcoming 5nm node advancements. The IP should represent a pretty straightforward successor to the already big jump that were the A76 and A77.

The New Cortex-X1: Breaking the Design Constraint Chains

Arm’s existing business model was aimed at trying to create a CPU IP that covers the widest range of customer needs. This creates the problem that you cannot hyper-focus on any one area of the PPA triangle without making compromises in the other two. I mentioned that Arm’s CPU cores have for years lived in the shadow of Apple’s CPU cores, and whilst for sure, the Apple's cores were technical superior, one very large contributing factor in Arm's disadvantage was that the business side of Arm just couldn’t justify building a bigger microarchitecture.

As the company is gaining more customers, and is ramping up R&D resources for designing higher performance cores (with the server space being a big driver), it seems that Arm has finally managed to get to a cross-over point in their design abilities. The company is now able to build and deliver more than a single microarchitecture per year. In a sense, we sort of saw the start of this last year with the introduction of the Neoverse-N1 CPU, already having some more notable microarchitectural changes over its Cortex-A76 mobile sibling.

Taking a quick look at the new Cortex-X1, we find the X1 higher up in Arm’s Greek pantheon family tree of CPU microarchitectures. Codenamed Hera, the design at least is named similarly to its Hercules sibling, denominating their close design relationship. The X1 is much alike the A78 in its fundamental design – in fact both CPUs were created by the same Austin CPU design team in tandem, but with the big difference that the X1 breaks the chains on its power and area constraints, focusing to get the very best performance with very little regard to the other two metrics of the PPA triangle.

The Cortex-X1 was designed within the frame of a new program at Arm, which the company calls the “Cortex-X Custom Program”. The program is an evolution of what the company had previously already done with the “Built on Arm Cortex Technology” program released a few years ago. As a reminder, that license allowed customers to collaborate early in the design phase of a new microarchitecture, and request customizations to the configurations, such as a larger re-order buffer (ROB), differently tuned prefetchers, or interface customizations for better integrations into the SoC designs. Qualcomm was the predominant benefactor of this license, fully taking advantage of the core re-branding options.

The new Cortex-X program is an evolution of the BoACT license, this time around making much more significant microarchitectural changes to the “base” design that is listed on Arm’s product roadmap. Here, Arm proclaims that it allows customers to customize and differentiate their products more; but the real gist of it is that the company now has the resources to finally do what some of its lead customers have been requesting for years.

One thing to note, is that while Arm names the program the “Cortex-X Custom Program”, it’s not to be confused with actual custom microarchitectures by vendors with an architectural license. The custom refers to Arm’s customization of their roadmap CPU cores – the design is still very much built by Arm themselves and they deliver the IP. For now, the X1 IP will also be identical between all licensees, but the company doesn’t rule out vendor-specific changes the future iterations – if there’s interest.

This time around Arm also maintains the marketing and branding over the core, meaning we’ll not be seeing the CPU under different names. All in all, the whole marketing disclosure around the design program is maybe a bit confusing – the simple matter of fact is that the X1 is simply another separate CPU IP offering by Arm, aimed at its leading partners, who are likely willing to pay more for more performance.

At the end of the day, what we're getting are two different microarchitectures – both designed by the same team, and both sharing the same fundamental design blocks – but with the A78 focusing on maximizing the PPA metric and having a big focus on efficiency, while the new Cortex-X1 is able to maximize performance, even if that means compromising on higher power usage or a larger die area.

It’s an incredible design philosophy change for Arm, as the company is no longer handicapped in the ultra-high-tier performance ring with the big players such as Apple, AMD, or Intel – all whilst still retaining their bread & butter design advantages for the more cost-oriented vendors out there who deliver hundreds of millions of devices.

Let’s start by dissecting the microarchitecture changes of the new CPUs, starting off with the Cortex-A78…

The Cortex-A78 Micro-architecture: PPA Focused
Comments Locked

192 Comments

View All Comments

  • deil - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Apple love to exaggerate and use perfect scenarios. 2x faster IF you take 250$ snap model like (4XX) series and 700$ iphone. I digged though their comparisons and each of them mention worst care for others and best for them. Most of iphones dont have even 20% lead in raw performance, all it gains is efficient OS, while android is bulky and slow.
    another example was m1 mentioned 5x faster than "similar sized most popular laptop" which by amazon was 269$ laptop with ryzen 3200u, dated low end offering which had ~4000 points in benches when marked already had 4700u's in same form factor with 20000 points.
    when comparing 300$ vs 900$ laptops, it really might look like m1 is so godlike.
  • FreckledTrout - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link

    Interesting move. Can we assume the choice to keep the pipeline fairly short means ARM are targeting tablet/phones with this design?
  • skavi - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link

    were you expecting it to target desktop?
  • Kangal - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link

    It would've been nice. Remember back in 2016 ARM had a clean three tier offering:
    Cortex A35 - Ultra-low power
    Cortex A53 - Low power
    Cortex A73 - Medium power

    I was hoping a similar thing to happen. Maybe it will come on a new architecture-branch, ergo ARMv9, maybe in 2022. Perhaps they can look into cores for laptops, desktops, servers. For instance:
    ARM v9 Cortex A41 - Ultra-low power, same as A55 perf.
    ARM v9 Cortex A61 - Low power, same as A73 perf.
    ARM v9 Cortex A81 - Medium power, beyond Apple A14 perf.

    Although, a big part will be optimisations and implementing a new InfinityFabric, big.LITTLE, DynamIQ style platform that scales from wearables to desktop.
  • SarahKerrigan - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link

    A78 looks like another A73 - modest perf gains, but improved efficiency. X1 is fascinating; I wasn't expecting to see an aggressive design like that until Matterhorn.
  • vladx - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link

    Cortex-A73 had in fact lower IPC than Cortex-A72, which is not the case here with Cortex-A78.
  • tipoo - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link

    Page 2's index should read A78 rather than A77, I believe :)
  • MrCommunistGen - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link

    Thanks for fixing Andrei/team!
  • eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link

    Agree that this is an interesting move, both design- and strategy-wise. While the Hera (X1) core will make a great single top performance core (1x Fast+Big, 3xBig, 4xLittle) for upcoming mobile Snapdragons and Exynos SoCs, I am also curious how Hera will boost the efforts of QC and Samsung for Windows-on-Arm CPUs.

    The one big fly in ARM's ointment is that they apparently still believe that their A55 remains the greatest Little core they've designed to date. Isn't that design getting a bit dated, especially compared with Apple's efficiency cores, which Apple does manage to update quite regularly? What's up with that? Any information or rumors on an A57 or A58?
  • SarahKerrigan - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link

    As far as I know, there's going to be a new little core announced alongside Matterhorn next year.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now