Custom cores versus ARM cores, what is it all about?

hello there my name is Gary Sims from Android Authority now when you've been hearing about smart phones particularly been hearing about smartphone processors maybe you've come across this term custom core now the question is what is a custom core why do people make such a fuss about them and who is it that actually designs them well let's find out so the inside your smartphone is a think relay system on a chip it's a silicon chip with various components on it including a CPU a GPU a memory controller a DSP and maybe a few other interesting bits and pieces now the design for the CPU can come from one of several places including from Intel or from arm now all I phones and the vast majority of Android phones use CPU designs from Armour so there are some difference between arm and inter when it comes to their business models and weight comes to the philosophy of designing their chips for example all ARM chips are RISC chips now RISC sounds will reduced instruction set computing whereas Intel chips are complex instruction set computers or sisk computers now what does this mean that means that in a reduced instruction set computer the number of available instructions to the program are reduced they are simpler but the downside is that you might have to do two or three instructions to achieve the same thing you'd include with one single instruction on a sisk chip but the idea is because they are simpler it means the chippies easy to design and it can run faster because it's doing less complicated work and it can run through those structions actually a lot quicker now I said there was a business difference between the way these two companies work Intel makes its own chip it designs its own chips it manufactures its own chips and it sells them directly to other companies like ASIS for the zenfone 2 for example arm is different arm doesn't have a fabrication plant it doesn't make chips it doesn't have a physical place what it does it just designs chips and their licenses those designs to other companies like Qualcomm or like Samsung as a result of this licensing arrangement arm has lots of partners who partner with it to build actual physical silicon chips and the big partners in terms of smartphones are Qualcomm and Sam's and why away and media tag and end video and so on now each one of these companies is a licensee there are two types of licenses they can either be a core licensee or they can be an architectural licensee now a core licensee is someone who takes the exact core design for let's say the cortex a 57 or the court is a 72 and they bring it as it is into their chip design adding on the other stuff they want to add on around that chip now the other type of licensee is an architectural licensee now these are people that say we want to license your architecture the instruction set and the philosophies behind reduced instruction set computing but they want to design their own actual chip and then put that on their system on a chip now many times these companies that are architect or licensees are also core licensee so they have a choice when they come to design and SOC where they want to use a core from arm where they want to design their own one and this is where we get the term custom core it's the idea of an ARM architecture licensee who has designed their own core rather than using a core from arm now arm has several architectural license seasoned they include Qualcomm and Samsung and NVIDIA and Huawei and of course Apple what I have to do quickly is look at how these different companies are using their custom cause how they're using their architectural licenses from arm so first of all it look at Qualcomm now Qualcomm is really a classic example of an arm licensee it likes its core design so for example the Snapdragon 810 uses the cortex a53 design it uses the cortex a57 design in fact they're an octa-core chip with four of each of those inside that CPU but previously before the shift was made to 64-bit Qualcomm was using its architectural license to design its own calls and it became very popular using its crate cause that we were found in the Snapdragon 801 the Snapdragon 805 and others now the Snapdragon 820 that's coming out has also got qualcomm z' own designed core at this time is called cryo so it uses architectural license to build its own design and put it into its own system on chip however it's still using arms calls in other of its system-on-a-chip so examples the Snapdragon six five two will use four cortex a53 calls and four cortex a seventy two cores so across its whole product range Qualcomm has a whole different set of core some are from arm and some are from its own design team so if Qualcomm were a classic example of an arm licensee then Apple isn't a typical example you see Qualcomm makes its system on chips and it sells them to other smartphone makers like Sony or HTC or even to Samsung whereas Apple only makes chips for its own foes doesn't sell them to anybody else now up until the iPhone 4s Apple were using arms cortex designs in fact the iPhone 4s had a dual-core cortex a9 chip inside of it but with the release of the iPhone 5 what happened is is that Apple had bought a silicon design company a few years before called a PA semi and they use that team to design their own arm core using their architectural license that they had from arm and the result was the custom core which we call Swift and that's what was found in the iPhone 5 then when the release of the iPhone 5s came out Apple actually really had a lead on everybody else in that in fact that it released a 64-bit core called site clone and this actually left other people like Qualcomm and Samsung kind of in the dirt really because they were now from how history played out there was 18 months before Qualcomm and Samsung were able to bring out 64-bit chip so Apple took the lead by designing our own custom core 64-bit chip of course that 64-bit chip has to be compatible with arms architecture as all about Samsung or Samsung is a classic arm licensee it has a core license and it also has an architectural license for example the Exynos 7420 you might find in the Samsung Galaxy s6 uses four cortex a53 calls and four cortex a57 cores and those core designs had come directly from arm however the new series of chips is designed the X naught 8 series is going to use four cortex a53 caused directly from arm but it's also going to use four of its OH cause which is designed in-house and that is currently codenamed Mongoose and we don't know the performance of that we don't actually turn out but that's what our Samsung are planning we think for the Galaxy s7 and then for the next note that comes after that and so on now another company that has an architectural license is Nvidia now Nvidia have core licenses and architectural license if we remember where the original Nexus 7 tablet was released it used a chip called the Nvidia tegra3 now after the success of the Nvidia tegra3 Nvidia then try to make the air Tegra 4 and the 4i and due to various problems in the development process maybe some managerial problems those chips turned out to be pretty poor and behind the rest of the competition and they didn't really have much commercial success but moving on from the Tegra 4 the company then went on to release the Tegra k1 now the k1 was a bit of a funny chip because it came in two different format it could either be a 32-bit cortex a15 design quad-core or it could be a dual-core 64-bit design using a core known as Denver or project Denver now project Denver was using arms architectural license to build a chip that could compatible with arms architectural but was actually designed in-house by Nvidia now the difference with the Denver core was is actually trying to use a technology called code morphing which means that the actual chip itself could theoretically run any computer instruction set from any design and when it's presented with those instructions it breaks them down internally morph them into its own instruction set which it then runs on the silicon if you remember there was a company called transmeta that briefly employed Linus Torvalds the creator of the lineups or Linux operating system and that company tried to do exactly the same thing now the story from the industry insiders is that the Nvidia chip the NVIDIA Tegra project was actually going to be able to run both Intel and arm instruction set at the same time however what happened is they couldn't get a license from Intel and it just got left using the arm instruction set now that chip did see the light of day in fact it is the chip that is the Nexus 9 tablet if you want to find out more information about the background behind code morphing the background behind how in video designing their CPUs then please check out semi accurate com2 good source for this kind of information now the problem is is that the Denver project really was kind of bent bold on invidious part because transmitter had tried this approach before and basically failed and cut the company closed down and NVIDIA claimed that had big plans for this technology however we don't really think the project's alive anymore there's nothing really else going on in video aren't talking about it anymore and in fact the x1 the next chip that came out the Tegra x1 went back to using arms core designs arm cortex a53 and ARM Cortex a 57 now the thing there are lots of different ways to source an arm compatible core the question is our custom cause actually better and of course this reads to the question what do you mean by better because there are different characteristics we can use this performance are certainly characteristic we can measure but then there's also efficiency and there's also the cost associated with the design and manufacture of the chip of that chip then there is marketing what impact does having a custom core have on marketing and then there's diversity do they design just one core or do they design many cores when it comes to performance we might be able to say that Apple have the lead and this actually makes sense because Apple have been making their own custom 64-bit calls now for three generations first two its cyclone and then you know typhoon mini head twister even arm itself is only on its second generation of 64-bit calls you had the cortex a 57 then you had the cortex a 72 as a second generation and yet we haven't heard about the how many official announcement they way about the third generation and Qualcomm and Samsung are only now producing their first generation 64-bit arm compatible cores so in that sense we can expect Apple to be ahead in terms of performance what about efficiency who has the most efficient core out there well actually that price does go to arm itself because not only does arm produce the a 72 in the a 57 cause it also produces 853 calls and it's also recently announced the a 35 court and this also brings us to the issue of diversity Apple are only designing one core for one specific task Qualcomm are designing only one core for one specific task Samsung is only one core for one specific task whereas arm have the court it's 8:35 the court is 853 the court is a 5,700 court is a 72 and there are other calls coming down the pipeline that we expect to be announced during 2016 and of course that brings us to marketing what is the point of all this in terms of marketing well there seems to be some power in saying we have our own core that we've designed and then you can they can trot out all lots of statistics about what it means and maybe that has an influence over consumers about which phone they're going to buy because they like the idea that it has a particular custom core designed by their favorite company so does all this mean well first of all it means there's plenty of choice for consumers and choice is good if you want aid a cortex a 72 core you can have it if you want Mongoose that's available if you want cryo you could try that if you want one of apples cause go with that the choice is really yours as the consumer second if it means there's plenty of competition amongst these different design teams each team is able to be pushed by another team to achieve new goals to achieve new ends to push the technology to the next level if there was no competition then this technology could stagnate my name is Gary Sims from Andrew Authority and I really hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up also please don't forget to subscribe to Andrew authority's YouTube channel don't forget to check out our website and Rory calm and also don't forget to use the comments below to tell me what you think about the different core designs are available from the different companies and as for me I'll see you in my next video

Channel: Android Authority

Views: 68,577

Rating: 4.9462528 out of 5

Keywords: ARM, Cortex, CPU, SOC, AndroidAuthority, Android

Id: kw2Q1iJYNCQ

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2016