Huawei Kirin 930 Chip Uses High Frequency Cortex-A53 For High-End Performance

[Guest]

Huawei announced its new high-end SoC containing eight cores of which four Cortex-A53 cores have a low clock speed of 1.2 GHz and the other four have a high clock speed of 2 GHz.

Huawei Kirin 930 Chip Uses High Frequency Cortex-A53 For High-End Performance : Read more

 

[JeffroGymnast]

I find it intriguing that they relate power to frequency linearly....

Surely by the time you clock an A53 to over 2 GHz it uses more power per GHz than when it's at 1.2...

 

[PEJUman]

I find it intriguing that they relate power to frequency linearly....

Surely by the time you clock an A53 to over 2 GHz it uses more power per GHz than when it's at 1.2...

I think the idea was to leverage the 16nm process to compensate for the increased power/Ghz for 53e.

i.e. they are comparing 2 Ghz, 53e@16nm vs. 2Ghz, 57@20nm, and found the power/Ghz is significantly better with 53e.

 

[aldaia]

I find it intriguing that they relate power to frequency linearly....

Surely by the time you clock an A53 to over 2 GHz it uses more power per GHz than when it's at 1.2...

Nothing intriguing at all. It is well known that power consumption of a processor is proportional to C*V^2*F where C is the equivalent capacity of the circuit, V the voltage and F the the frequency. So, as long as the voltage is kept constant, power scales linearly with frequency. Of course if voltage needs to be raised then bad thinga happen, since power grows proportional to the square of the voltage.

 

[JeffroGymnast]

They'd be throwing power consuption out the window if they were to run the cpu with more voltage than necessary... And a doubling of frequency is definitely going to require considerably more voltage, all else held constant.

I find it intriguing that they relate power to frequency linearly....

Surely by the time you clock an A53 to over 2 GHz it uses more power per GHz than when it's at 1.2...

Nothing intriguing at all. It is well known that power consumption of a processor is proportional to C*V^2*F where C is the equivalent capacity of the circuit, V the voltage and F the the frequency. So, as long as the voltage is kept constant, power scales linearly with frequency. Of course if voltage needs to be raised then bad thinga happen, since power grows proportional to the square of the voltage.

 

[jrharbort]

The typical 'top speed' of the A53 core on 20nm is 1.7GHz (you often see 4@1.2GHz x 4@1.7GHz A53 cpu configurations). So the slight bump to 2GHz using 16nm is not that drastic. This was actually a nice idea for cost, performance and power ratios.