Samsung-ARM 7LPP And 5LPE Partnership To Deliver 3GHz Cortex-A76 Phone Chips
ARM is teaming up with Samsung's foundry to design and manufacturer the recently announced Cortex-A76 core on a 7-nanometer low power plus (LPP) processor. Sometime down the line, they will extend this collaboration to 5nm low power early (LPE). This collaborating is expected to enable processing speeds in excess of 3GHz for the next-generation of mobile devices.
"Building an extensive and differentiated design ecosystem is a must for our foundry customers," said Ryan Sanghyun Lee, vice president of Foundry Marketing Team at Samsung Electronics. "Collaboration with Arm in the fields of IP solutions is crucial to increase high-performance computing power and accelerate the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities."
The collaboration is centered on ARM's Artisan physical IP platform, of which the two companies have worked together before. This is really an extension that relationship, with an eye towards 7nm and 5nm, and ramping up clockspeeds.
"ARM and Samsung Foundry have collaborated on a large number of chips using Artisan physical IP on Samsung Foundry process technologies," said Kelvin Low, vice president of marketing, Physical Design Group at ARM. "Samsung Foundry’s 7LPP and 5LPE nodes are innovative process technologies which will meet our mutual customers’ needs to deliver the next generation of advanced system-on-chips (SoCs) from mobile to hyperscale datacenters."
The Cortex-A76 is a brand new architecture that ARM introduced at the end of April. It represents the most radical overall over previous designs to date, with decisive improvements to power and efficiency. ARM's processor engineers worked with a design goal of outperforming their competitor's designs, but with half the are and power.
It will take some time for the fruits of this collaboration between ARM and Samsung to show up in consumer devices—production on the 7nm LPP processor is scheduled to being in the second half of this year, so we could be looking at 2019 before phones based on the new hardware arrive.
