Re:Arm unveils 7nm Cortex-A76 CPU
by sligor on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @09:06AM
(#17237233)
the problem is that many low-end and middle-end android tablets are based on Cortex A53 which is a slow in-order CPU (but very power efficient).... The Flash storage performance is also very important for user experience and is often left behind in reviews
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And what's often an even bigger deal is many of the low-to-mid end devices have very, very little cache (some have no L2 cache, even!).
Wait, what? I'm trying to think of an application SoC from the past 8 years that doesn't have an L2 cache.
I'm struggling to find the one I was thinking of, maybe I'm just imagining it. Most things I can find are 256kB/core, which is the same as most Intel chips (though the A11 is over 1MB/core!).
Yeah, you borderline need an L2 for any multicore systems. L2's main job on most designs is coherency and reducing the explosion of bandwidth needs from the cores all vying for the main memory bus.