Re:Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-proc...
by simonh on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:11PM
(#15500882)
The problem is there is no magic wand the Android SOC manufacturers can wave to match Apple on chip performance. It's a multi-front war.
Firstly yes Apple is well ahead in CPU core design and has been since 2013 when they brought out the first 64-bit ARM chip. And yes I know 64 bit by itself doesn't account for the performance increase, but the 64-bit ARM core architecture is much more streamlined and efficient than 32-bit which had accumulated all sorts of cruft over the years. The A7 wasn't just 64-bit, it was step change up in performance creating a gap that the other ARM vendors have never caught up with.
That's not the whole story though, core design alone isn't the only reason Apple chips are faster, another is they have dramatically more cache memory on chip that other designs. The A10 had a total of 7MB of L2 and L3 cache, more than double the maximum configuration for the 835. Apple SOCs are massive, which makes them expensive.
Finally, they can build in customised capabilities in hardware to support specific high level features, such as the secure enclave and the neural engine in A11 Bionic to support image post-processing effects and face recognition. This is clearly what Google is trying to do, but in an add-on chip because they're not (yet?) up to designing their own SOC.
So it's not just the the Apple SOCs are faster, the reasons why they are faster are on several different axes. Some SOC vendors apparently say their profit margin lies in shaving off just one or two square millimetres of die size. Market forces like that would never produce a chip like the A11. So really this approach by Google of designing their own custom co-processor, and maybe eventually their own SOCs, could be the only way to close this gap.
Firstly yes Apple is well ahead in CPU core design and has been since 2013 when they brought out the first 64-bit ARM chip. And yes I know 64 bit by itself doesn't account for the performance increase, but the 64-bit ARM core architecture is much more streamlined and efficient than 32-bit which had accumulated all sorts of cruft over the years. The A7 wasn't just 64-bit, it was step change up in performance creating a gap that the other ARM vendors have never caught up with.
That's not the whole story though, core design alone isn't the only reason Apple chips are faster, another is they have dramatically more cache memory on chip that other designs. The A10 had a total of 7MB of L2 and L3 cache, more than double the maximum configuration for the 835. Apple SOCs are massive, which makes them expensive.
Finally, they can build in customised capabilities in hardware to support specific high level features, such as the secure enclave and the neural engine in A11 Bionic to support image post-processing effects and face recognition. This is clearly what Google is trying to do, but in an add-on chip because they're not (yet?) up to designing their own SOC.
So it's not just the the Apple SOCs are faster, the reasons why they are faster are on several different axes. Some SOC vendors apparently say their profit margin lies in shaving off just one or two square millimetres of die size. Market forces like that would never produce a chip like the A11. So really this approach by Google of designing their own custom co-processor, and maybe eventually their own SOCs, could be the only way to close this gap.