Samsung’s new CPU is on par with Apple, but whether or not it will debut is another story

Specifically, a new document recently published online by Samsung’s CPU team in Austin, “Evolution of the Samsung Exynos CPU Microarchitecture” (Evolution of the Samsung Exynos CPU microarchitecture), details the calendar. The history of this M core, and revealed information about the M6 ​​CPU has never been published before.

We still don’t know about the fate of the M6 ​​CPU developed by Samsung. Although the design team was disbanded, their CPUs were ready for completion by the time of publication. Therefore, there is a possibility that Samsung will use a final Exynos SoC with Mongoose core for a product that will be released in late 2020 or early 2021. Or maybe the company will quickly switch to using SoC Cortex-A78. or the latest ARM Cortex-X1. We will have to wait a while longer for the official information. For now, let’s take a look at what’s interesting about M6.

What do we know about Samsung M6 CPUs?

The document mentioned above contains everything you need to know about M6. Here we just summarize some key information only. In short, M6 is Samsung’s latest and most powerful CPU. It is designed with 5nm process and has clock speed up to 2.8GHz.

The noteworthy feature of M6 is that it has L1 cache up to 128KB, L2 2MB, and L3 4MB, providing each core much more memory than other CPUs. The M6 ​​core is also executable, with 6 basic math processing units, 2 branch units, and 4 FMAC / FMUL / FADD units to handle large calculations. The decoding duct section has 8 instructions, giving the units the ability to perform many tasks per clock cycle. The M6 ​​also has an improved predictor, larger than 50%, designed to accommodate changes in common programming languages ​​and styles.

The table below compares the key components of the M6’s CPU with Apple’s A13 Lightning core and ARM’s Cortex-X1. There are quite a few similarities between these cores, showing the trend of vendors in increasing instruction per clock and increasing parallel processing. M6 is a very powerful core, with superior single-thread performance compared to M5. Samsung obviously wants to achieve the same performance as Apple with the M6, but what the actual performance is, we don’t know yet. And the ability to save electricity is also a completely different matter.

Instead, the comparison shows the needs and motivation of companies to further enhance the performance of modern smartphones. The functions and tasks that mobile devices need to undertake have changed and greatly increased since Samsung launched the first generation M1 core. Some applications require more instructions on each clock to achieve maximum performance. This means that the CPU must have a larger pipeline system, with more execution units, and therefore need more cache and smarter predictors. As a result, we have CPU cores that consume more power, are more expensive, and are smaller in size.

In the document, Samsung engineers said that the average number of instructions per cycle increased from only 1.06 with M1 to 2.71 with M6, an increase of 20.6% per year.

What to expect at the upcoming high-end Soyn Exynos

A mobile chip has more issues to discuss than just the CPU, but information related to Samsung’s next-generation SoC Exynos is still quite vague at the moment. Considering the information available on the M6, it is likely that Samsung will give Mongoose a last chance. But what is controversial is if this M6 core is as disappointing as M5 on some Galaxy S20 variants? On the contrary, its fans will complain about Samsung’s decision to shut down its CPU R&D division if the new SoC Exynos is of better quality than before.

If the M6 ​​has been canceled, Samsung still has plenty of options for their next-generation SoC. The ARM Cortex-A78 has a better power-saving ability, but doesn’t really match the company’s design goals for the past decade. Instead, ARM’s Cortex-X1 CPU has the single-core performance that Samsung is pursuing. But that’s only possible if Samsung joins ARM’s CXC program. On the GPU side, using Mali-G78 seems to be a reasonable option. While a Samsung SoC with AMD GPU is planned for 2021, possibly coinciding with the launch of the Galaxy S30, there are many other possibilities.

Samsung always releases a new Exynos chip with every generation of Galaxy Note, and there’s a 5nm chip that’s rumored to be in development for the Galaxy Note 20. But the company often refreshes its CPU cores periodically. Every year. Most likely we will have to wait until Samsung SoC Exynos 2021 version is released to know the fate of the M6.

Reference: AndroidAuthority