LONDON—At its annual, somewhat exclusive Tech Day event, ARM has detailed its new high-performance CPU core: Cortex A72. In simple terms, the A72 is a faster, more efficient, and smaller version of the Cortex A57. The first 16nm FinFET mobile SoCs with the Cortex A72 CPU will likely ship in 2016, fabricated by TSMC. In the words of Mike Filippo, ARM's chief architect for Cortex A72, "Our focus on A72 was to achieve next-gen performance and pull a ton of power out of the design. We did that in spades."
In more detailed terms, the Cortex A72 CPU pairs a three-wide, in-order front end with a five-wide, out-of-order back end (i.e. 8-issue). This is significantly wider than the A57, resulting in higher single-threaded performance. Along with the new architecture, ARM has "re-optimized every logical block from Cortex A57" to reduce power consumption and area (i.e. die size), which in turn reduces static power losses through leakage.
Drilling down into some of the more significant logical block changes: ARM says the A72 has a much better branch prediction, around 20 percent better than the A57. There's also a reworked 3-way L1 cache that's "almost as powerful as direct-mapped cache," and a much smaller (~10 percent) and reorganized dispatch unit.
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