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ARM Cortex-A78
The ARM Cortex-A78 is a central processing unit implementing the ARMv8.2-A 64-bit instruction set designed by ARM Ltd.'s Austin centre, set to be distributed amongst high-end devices in 2020–2021. Design The ARM Cortex-A78 is the successor to the ARM Cortex-A77. It can be paired with the ARM Cortex-X1 and/or ARM Cortex-A55 CPUs in a DynamIQ configuration to deliver both performance and efficiency. The processor also claims as much as 50% energy savings over its predecessor. The Cortex-A78 is a 4-wide decode out-of-order superscalar design with a 1.5K macro-OP (MOPs) cache. It can fetch 4 instructions and 6 Mops per cycle, and rename and dispatch 6 Mops, and 13 µops per cycle. The out-of-order window size is 160 entries and the backend has 13 execution ports with a pipeline depth of 13 stages, and the execution latencies consist of 10 stages. The processor is built on a standard Cortex-A roadmap and offers a 2.1 GHz ( 5 nm) chipset which makes it better than its p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ARM Ltd
Arm is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England. Its primary business is in the design of ARM processors (CPUs). It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView and Keil brands, and provides systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip (SoC) infrastructure and software. As a "holding" company, it also holds shares of other companies. Since 2016, it has been owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group. While ARM CPUs first appeared in the Acorn Archimedes, a desktop computer, today's systems include mostly embedded systems, including ARM CPUs used in virtually all smartphones. Systems such as iPhones and Android smartphones frequently include many chips, from many different providers, that include one or more licensed Arm cores, in addition to those in the main Arm-based processor. Arm's core designs are also used in chips that support all the most common network-related technologies. Process ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
5 Nm Process
In semiconductor manufacturing, the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems defines the 5 nm process as the MOSFET technology node following the 7 nm node. In 2020, Samsung and TSMC entered volume production of 5 nm chips, manufactured for companies including Apple, Marvell, Huawei and Qualcomm. The term "5 nanometer" has no relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a 5 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 51 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 30 nanometers. However, in real world commercial practice, "5 nm" is used primarily as a marketing term by individual microchip manufacturers to refer to a new, improved generation of silicon semiconductor chips in terms of increased transistor density (i.e. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
System On A Chip
A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memory interfaces, on-chip input/output devices, input/output interfaces, and secondary storage interfaces, often alongside other components such as radio modems and a graphics processing unit (GPU) – all on a single substrate or microchip. It may contain digital, analog, mixed-signal, and often radio frequency signal processing functions (otherwise it is considered only an application processor). Higher-performance SoCs are often paired with dedicated and physically separate memory and secondary storage (such as LPDDR and eUFS or eMMC, respectively) chips, that may be layered on top of the SoC in what's known as a package on package (PoP) configuration, or be placed close to the SoC. Additionally, SoCs may use separate wireless m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Die (integrated Circuit)
A die, in the context of integrated circuits, is a small block of semiconducting material on which a given functional circuit is fabricated. Typically, integrated circuits are produced in large batches on a single wafer of electronic-grade silicon (EGS) or other semiconductor (such as GaAs) through processes such as photolithography. The wafer is cut ( diced) into many pieces, each containing one copy of the circuit. Each of these pieces is called a die. There are three commonly used plural forms: ''dice'', ''dies'' and ''die''. To simplify handling and integration onto a printed circuit board, most dies are packaged in various forms. Manufacturing process Most dies are composed of silicon and used for integrated circuits. The process begins with the production of monocrystalline silicon ingots. These ingots are then sliced into disks with a diameter of up to 300 mm. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Image Processor
An image processor, also known as an image processing engine, image processing unit (IPU), or image signal processor (ISP), is a type of media processor or specialized digital signal processor (DSP) used for image processing, in digital cameras or other devices. Image processors often employ parallel computing even with SIMD or MIMD technologies to increase speed and efficiency. The digital image processing engine can perform a range of tasks. To increase the system integration on embedded devices, often it is a system on a chip with multi-core processor architecture. Function Bayer transformation The photodiodes employed in an image sensor are color-blind by nature: they can only record shades of grey. To get color into the picture, they are covered with different color filters: red, green and blue ( RGB) according to the pattern designated by the Bayer filter - named after its inventor. As each photodiode records the color information for exactly one pixel of the image, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digital Signal Processor
A digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor chip, with its architecture optimized for the operational needs of digital signal processing. DSPs are fabricated on MOS integrated circuit chips. They are widely used in audio signal processing, telecommunications, digital image processing, radar, sonar and speech recognition systems, and in common consumer electronic devices such as mobile phones, disk drives and high-definition television (HDTV) products. The goal of a DSP is usually to measure, filter or compress continuous real-world analog signals. Most general-purpose microprocessors can also execute digital signal processing algorithms successfully, but may not be able to keep up with such processing continuously in real-time. Also, dedicated DSPs usually have better power efficiency, thus they are more suitable in portable devices such as mobile phones because of power consumption constraints. DSPs often use special memory architectures that are a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Display Controller
A video display controller or VDC (also called a display engine or display interface) is an integrated circuit which is the main component in a video-signal generator, a device responsible for the production of a TV video signal in a computing or game system. Some VDCs also generate an audio signal, but that is not their main function. VDCs were used in the home computers of the 1980s and also in some early video picture systems. The VDC is the main component of the video signal generator logic, responsible for generating the timing of video signals such as the horizontal and vertical synchronization signals and the blanking interval signal. Sometimes other supporting chips were necessary to build a complete system, such as RAM to hold pixel data, ROM to hold character fonts, or some discrete logic such as shift registers. Most often the VDC chip is completely integrated in the logic of the main computer system, (its video RAM appears in the memory map of the main CPU), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semiconductor Intellectual Property Core
In electronic design, a semiconductor intellectual property core (SIP core), IP core, or IP block is a reusable unit of logic, cell, or integrated circuit layout design that is the intellectual property of one party. IP cores can be licensed to another party or owned and used by a single party. The term comes from the licensing of the patent or source code copyright that exists in the design. Designers of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) and systems of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) logic can use IP cores as building blocks. History The licensing and use of IP cores in chip design came into common practice in the 1990s. There were many licensors and also many foundries competing on the market. In 2013, the most widely licensed IP cores are from Arm Holdings (43.2% market share), Synopsys Inc. (13.9% market share), Imagination Technologies (9% market share) and Cadence Design Systems (5.1% market share). Types of IP cores The use of an IP core in ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Re-order Buffer
A re-order buffer (ROB) is a hardware unit used in an extension to the Tomasulo algorithm to support out-of-order and speculative instruction execution. The extension forces instructions to be committed in-order. The buffer is a circular buffer (to provide a FIFO instruction ordering queue) implemented as an array/vector (which allows recording of results against instructions as they complete out of order). There are three stages to the Tomasulo algorithm: "Issue", "Execute", "Write Result". In an extension to the algorithm, there is an additional "Commit" stage. During the Commit stage, instruction results are stored in a register or memory. The "Write Result" stage is modified to place results in the re-order buffer. Each instruction is tagged in the reservation station A unified reservation station, also known as unified scheduler, is a decentralized feature of the microarchitecture of a CPU that allows for register renaming In computer architecture, register renami ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Register Renaming
In computer architecture, register renaming is a technique that abstracts logical registers from physical registers. Every logical register has a set of physical registers associated with it. When a machine language instruction refers to a particular logical register, the processor transposes this name to one specific physical register on the fly. The physical registers are opaque and cannot be referenced directly but only via the canonical names. This technique is used to eliminate false data dependencies arising from the reuse of registers by successive instructions that do not have any real data dependencies between them. The elimination of these false data dependencies reveals more instruction-level parallelism in an instruction stream, which can be exploited by various and complementary techniques such as superscalar and out-of-order execution for better performance. Problem approach In a register machine, programs are composed of instructions which operate on values. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clock Rate
In computing, the clock rate or clock speed typically refers to the frequency at which the clock generator of a processor can generate pulses, which are used to synchronize the operations of its components, and is used as an indicator of the processor's speed. It is measured in the SI unit of frequency hertz (Hz). The clock rate of the first generation of computers was measured in hertz or kilohertz (kHz), the first personal computers (PCs) to arrive throughout the 1970s and 1980s had clock rates measured in megahertz (MHz), and in the 21st century the speed of modern CPUs is commonly advertised in gigahertz (GHz). This metric is most useful when comparing processors within the same family, holding constant other features that may affect performance. Determining factors Binning Manufacturers of modern processors typically charge premium prices for processors that operate at higher clock rates, a practice called binning. For a given CPU, the clock rates are determined at the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Branch Predictor
In computer architecture, a branch predictor is a digital circuit that tries to guess which way a branch (e.g., an if–then–else structure) will go before this is known definitively. The purpose of the branch predictor is to improve the flow in the instruction pipeline. Branch predictors play a critical role in achieving high performance in many modern pipelined microprocessor architectures such as x86. Two-way branching is usually implemented with a conditional jump instruction. A conditional jump can either be "taken" and jump to a different place in program memory, or it can be "not taken" and continue execution immediately after the conditional jump. It is not known for certain whether a conditional jump will be taken or not taken until the condition has been calculated and the conditional jump has passed the execution stage in the instruction pipeline (see fig. 1). Without branch prediction, the processor would have to wait until the conditional jump instruction ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
