The results of a silicon validation of ARM’s Big.Little chip architecture, showing performance improvements, have been announced. The validation used ‘Big’ Cortex-A57 and ‘Little’ Cortex-A53 processors on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET (16FF) process technology.
The ‘Big’ core reached 2.3GHz for sustained mobile peak performance and the ‘Little’ core was shown to consume just 75mW for ‘most common workloads’. ARM says that the improvements were the results of its work with TSMC to optimise ARM’s 64-bit v8-A processors in FinFIT technologies.
In the future, it is thought that an additional 11% improvement will be achieved with the Cortex-A57, at the same power level, using TSMC’s 16FF+ process. Power used by the Cortex A-53 will be reduced by 35% at the same time, when running low-intensity applications. 16FF+ is scheduled to be delivered this quarter.
