Discussion Mediatek SoC thread

[FlameTail]

According to Kurnal, Dimensity 9400 uses HP libraries for the Cortex X925 prime core.

Chip	Prime core	Library	Clock Speed
Dimensity 9400	Cortex X925	N3E HP	3.6 GHz
A18 Pro	A18-P	N3E HD	4.04 GHz
M4	M4-P	N3E HP	4.5 GHz
8 Elite	Oryon-L	N3E HP	4.32 GHz

Stock ARM cores still have a notable clock speed gap with custom ARM cores. Presumably due to some microarchitectural limitation?

PS: There's also a rumour that Google Tensor G7 will use their own custom cores, which has 16 MB shared L2 and a clock speed of 5 GHz.

Rather strange isn't it, that all these custom cores from Apple, Qualcomm and Google have many similarities: big shared L2, high clock speed, etc...

 

[gdansk]

Rather strange isn't it, that all these custom cores from Apple, Qualcomm and Google have many similarities: big shared L2, high clock speed, etc...

There may be a two or three different ways to build a high performance core. But there's only one way known to build a high performance low power core and Apple showed how.

 

[Meteor Late]

According to Kurnal, Dimensity 9400 uses HP libraries for the Cortex X925 prime core.

Chip	Prime core	Library	Clock Speed
Dimensity 9400	Cortex X925	N3E HP	3.6 GHz
A18 Pro	A18-P	N3E HD	4.04 GHz
M4	M4-P	N3E HP	4.5 GHz
8 Elite	Oryon-L	N3E HP	4.32 GHz

Stock ARM cores still have a notable clock speed gap with custom ARM cores. Presumably due to some microarchitectural limitation?

PS: There's also a rumour that Google Tensor G7 will use their own custom cores, which has 16 MB shared L2 and a clock speed of 5 GHz.

Rather strange isn't it, that all these custom cores from Apple, Qualcomm and Google have many similarities: big shared L2, high clock speed, etc...

A18 having HD and M4 having HP is weird to me, as previously there was like a 10% bump in frequency between A and M variants, just like now. Something is not right here.

 

[FlameTail]

A18 having HD and M4 having HP is weird to me, as previously there was like a 10% bump in frequency between A and M variants, just like now. Something is not right here.

Ah, that's where you might be wrong.

M4 N3E HP 4.5 GHz	A18 Pro N3E HD 4.04 GHz
M3 N3B 4.05 GHz	A17 Pro N3B 3.78 GHz
M2 N5P 3.5 GHz	A15 Bionic N5P 3.24 GHz
M1 N5 3.2 GHz	A14 Bionic N5 3.1 GHz

With the exception of M2/A15, it has been about a ~5% difference.

 

[FlameTail]

An update on that;

I have sources for M4, D9400 and 8 Elite using HP libraries for the P-core.

But the statement that A18 Pro uses HD libraries was an assumption by me, on the basis that the M4 vs A18 frequency gap is larger than the M3 vs A17 frequency gap.

It seems I was wrong to make that assumption, so I beg your pardon, good people. I took the dieshots and measured the P-core areas in A18 Pro and M4. The area is nearly identical (M4's is about 1% larger, but that could very well be measurement error). So it seems the P-cores of M4 and A18 Pro use the same libraries.

Also another thing to note is that TSMC 3nm has FinFlex, which blurs the line between HP and HD libraries. In TSMC 5nm, HP was 3-fin and HD was 2-fin. But FinFlex introduces new combinations such as 3-2 fin and 2-1 fin.

 

[Meteor Late]

An update on that;

I have sources for M4, D9400 and 8 Elite using HP libraries for the P-core.

But the statement that A18 Pro uses HD libraries was an assumption by me, on the basis that the M4 vs A18 frequency gap is larger than the M3 vs A17 frequency gap.

It seems I was wrong to make that assumption, so I beg your pardon, good people. I took the dieshots and measured the P-core areas in A18 Pro and M4. The area is nearly identical (M4's is about 1% larger, but that could very well be measurement error). So it seems the P-cores of M4 and A18 Pro use the same libraries.

Also another thing to note is that TSMC 3nm has FinFlex, which blurs the line between HP and HD libraries. In TSMC 5nm, HP was 3-fin and HD was 2-fin. But FinFlex introduces new combinations such as 3-2 fin and 2-1 fin.

Yeah, I've checked and I've seen 3 GHz, not 3.1, on A14 vs 3.2 GHz on M1, that's like 7% bump, same with M3. It wouldn't make sense to see such a small bump going from HD to HP. You don't go from 7% before to just 11% now using HP vs HD.