Intrinsity (Formerly Exponential Technology) Now Speeding Up ARM CPUs

[MacRumors]

One of the major announcements alongside the Apple iPad launch was the fact that Apple is now in the chipmaking business. The Apple A4 is a system-on-chip that includes an ARM based processor that is believed to have been designed by the engineers Apple acquired along with P.A. Semi.

In our previous research of ARM based chip technology, we found that a company called Intrinsity was making a name for itself by accelerating ARM CPU designs while reducing power consumption. In July, Samsung announced an Intrinsity enhanced 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor called the Hummingbird which was to take on Qualcomm Snapdragon. Intrinsity accomplishes this by simplifying designs which make for smaller transistors which ultimately provides additional power savings.

The key to this and many other performance tricks is the type of logic gate Intrinsity uses: 1-of-n domino logic, or NDL, part of its suite of technologies called Fast14 (named after the atomic number of silicon). Russo says NDL can speed up a logical step by 40 to 60 percent. About a fifth of the A8’s functions are benefiting from it, he adds.

What was most interesting to learn, however, was that the Intrinsity design team was formerly from Exponential Technology in the 1990s before its dissolution.

Longtime Apple watchers will remember Exponential Technology as the company that promised to deliver super-fast PowerPC chips at a time when PowerPC lagged behind their Intel counterparts. A 1996 press release has a quote from Apple describing the Exponential X704 as a "major competitive advantage" for the Macintosh platform. Apple was even a major investor of the company. The relationship ultimately soured, however, when it became clear that Exponential couldn't keep pace with Motorola and IBM. Exponential even filed suit against Apple after they decided not to use the chips.

Now, we don't necessarily believe that Intrinsity is currently working with Apple, but it's certainly possible that their paths may cross again as Intrinsity is applying their techniques to Cortex A9 based technology. The Cortex A9 is likely to power a number of future products both from Apple and other companies.

Article Link: Intrinsity (Formerly Exponential Technology) Now Speeding Up ARM CPUs

 

[HLdan]

I'm just happy that Apple is getting on the chip bandwagon so they don't have to rely on 3rd party companies like Intel. I love Intel's chips but the more Apple is not reliant on the them the better. The iPad's A4 chip is a great start.

 

[Diseal3]

Its gonna suck if they switch off intel. If they do switch we will have to worry about software changes recompiling and then developers have to support 3 different chips, then we need more bloat software in order to run programs for previous intel/powerpc chips. If this happens, this is my last mac.

 

[elhungarian]

Wirelessly posted (Opera/9.80 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/5.0.16831/2444; U; en) Presto/2.2.0)

Think Steve will do business with a company that sued them?

 

[kernkraft]

Not completely true

I always thought that the new A4 chip is just a renamed combination of mainstream chipmakers' products. Am I wrong?

Apple Inc isn't back to the chipmaking business, is it? Or actually, was it in there ever? But most importantly - there is no such thing as platform nine and three quarters, is there?

 

[neilw]

Folks need to understand the difference between the desktop space and the mobile space, which are entirely different.

1) Apple is not moving away from Intel CPUs for its Macs anytime soon (except, perhaps, for x86 AMD chips, but even that looks unlikely right now). Don't waste a moment worrying about it. No one else is competitive in the desktop space, least of all any Apple home grown technology.

2) In the mobile space, Apple (and most others) is already non-Intel as they use ARM chips. ARM licenses its cores to lots of different vendors (Samsung, Qualcomm, TI, Apple, etc.), and they can all apply their own optimizations to the design, integrate other components on-chip, etc. It remains unclear to me exactly how Apple's A4 design is better than anyone else's, but it's not hard to be at least competitive, because everyone is licensing the same processor core (Cortex A9) from ARM.

So none of this news has anything to do with Apple "moving away from Intel".

 

[arn]

I always thought that the new A4 chip is just a renamed combination of mainstream chipmakers' products. Am I wrong?

Well, it's an ARM design, but Apple has presumably customized it. So, it's not just a repackaging.

arn

 

[paulyras]

Apple Inc isn't back to the chipmaking business, is it? Or actually, was it in there ever? But most importantly - there is no such thing as platform nine and three quarters, is there?

Perhaps a better way of wording it is that they are in the chip architecture business. I'm sure they're using a contract fab to build the chips and not making them themselves.

That said, yes, people (including apple apparently) can take the Cortex design and tweak it to meet specific needs and goals. It's kind of like a new housing subdivision. Most of the houses are 95% identical, but if you invest while it's being built, you can tweak the specifics to meet your tastes and needs.*











*This is not an endorsement of suburbia. I, in fact, have a bitter loathing of suburbia...

 

[QEII Student IT]

I'm happy for Apple to make the iPad chip, and it seems very fast and very efficient too. But I'd like the macs to stick with intel, as we've been behind them before.

 

[Rocketman]

http://www.soccentral.com/results.asp?EntryID=22860

May 23, 2007 -- Intrinsity has applied its Fast14 Technology and processor architectural design expertise to deliver its first FastCore PowerPC core with an unprecedented combination of performance, power and area. Developed for AMCC, the Titan FastCore embedded core offers greater than 4000DMIPS at 2GHz, and consumes under 2.5W at 2GHz.

Intrinsity's CEO, Bob Russo, explained, "Ordinary static synthesized, or even firm, implementations of similar PowerPC cores struggle to attain 600MHz. Using Fast14 logic, our designers got over three times more speed from Titan — over 2 GHz — using the same 90-nm process technology. Titan's 4000-plus DMIPS at under 2.5 Watts power dissipation is unprecedented, as is the very small area envelope."

This is very interesting because you get about double the Ghz and the strong possibility of a PowerPC primary or secondary processor well within the power budget if a mere iPad.

ARM based OS, AND, PowerPC based OS?

Note this gents. Since this is a fabless license and since Apple has access to 32nm from a couple of possible suppliers, the headroom for some real leaps is right there. I might win that PowerMac bet after all. . . .

Rocketman

 

[commander.data]

So is Intrinsity in the microarchitecture design business or in the manufacturing process business? They seem to mention a lot about optimizing logic gates and transistors which seem process related so do we know how applicable this is to Samsung's Fabs or wherever Apple is having their chips made?

 

[iDisk]

Cortex A9?? I thought we were on the A9 now

In July, Samsung announced a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor called the Hummingbird which was to take on Qualcomm Snapdragon.

The Cortex-A9 core are superscalar execution giving over 2.0 DMIPS/MHz.
Not to mention a NEON SIMD instruction set extension performing up to 16 operations per instruction.

Along with those two theirs High performance Floating Point Unit (double the performance of previous ARM FPUs). The Thumb-2 instruction set encoding reduces the size of programs with little impact on performance.

You also have TrustZone security extensions, and Jazelle support for Java execution.

A single core (excluding caches) occupies less than 1.5 mm2 when designed in a TSMC 65 nanometer (nm) generic process, can be clocked at speeds over 1GHz and consumes less than 250mW per core.

I thought the A4 chip was based off the A9 not the A8 P.A. Semi wouldn't have been using that design (Meaning the A8) for the iPad and furture iPhone would they??

The A9 is what the A4 is based off of right??

Am I misreading the article?

 

[ThisIsNotMe]

Ug. I can only pray to god that Apple doesn't dump Intel and move back to the RISC architecture.

 

[Gray.2]

A4

I think what we are seeing here is not necessarily Apple getting into the chip-making business, but rather taking more control over what they want the chips to actually do.

By all accounts, the chips are being manufactured in Asia, like all or most of Apple's other hardware.

Steve Jobs is an absolute control freak (and for good reason) and the addition of the A4 is simply an extension of that.

If Intel had made a chip that was as good as or cheaper than the A4, then I would be willing to bet, Apple would have simply used that. Because Intel (or whoever) did not have what Apple wanted, they did it independently.

Also, what happened to A1-A3?

 

[iDisk]

Ug. I can only pray to god that Apple doesn't dump Intel and move back to the RISC architecture.

RISC is better for Apples C based language, The conditional execution feature (part of RISC) is implemented with a 4-bit condition code selector on every instruction; one of the four-bit codes is reserved as an "escape code" to specify certain unconditional instructions, but nearly all common instructions are conditional. Most CPU architectures only have condition codes on branch instructions.
This cuts down significantly on the encoding bits available for displacements in memory access instructions, but on the other hand it avoids branch instructions when generating code for small if statements

Also, what happened to A1-A3?

More the likely prototypes that didn't work out, during R&D, the A4 was more then likely the 1st Prototype that made it through the checklist to be "deemed" production worthy..... Not uncommon BTW in this industry

 

[arn]

Am I misreading the article?

The article doesn't say one way or the other if the A4 is based on A9 or not.

arn

 

[commander.data]

The Cortex-A9 core are superscalar execution giving over 2.0 DMIPS/MHz.
Not to mention a NEON SIMD instruction set extension performing up to 16 operations per instruction.

Along with those two theirs High performance Floating Point Unit (double the performance of previous ARM FPUs). The Thumb-2 instruction set encoding reduces the size of programs with little impact on performance.

You also have TrustZone security extensions, and Jazelle support for Java execution.

A single core (excluding caches) occupies less than 1.5 mm2 when designed in a TSMC 65 nanometer (nm) generic process, can be clocked at speeds over 1GHz and consumes less than 250mW per core.

I thought the A4 chip was based off the A9 not the A8 P.A. Semi wouldn't have been using that design (Meaning the A8) for the iPad and furture iPhone would they??

The A9 is what the A4 is based off of right??

Am I misreading the article?

We don't know what the Apple A4 is based off of. Everything is just speculation.

And all these marketing checkboxes you list are not ARM Cortex A9 exclusive features. The A8 also has NEON, Thumb-2, Jazelle, TrustZone, etc. In fact, even the ARM11 in the 1st and 2nd gen iPhone and iPod Touch had Thumb, Jazelle, and TrustZone support. And it's unknown whether Apple even uses Jazelle seeing that Java isn't supported or TrustZone anyways.

The ARM Cortex A8 is also a superscalar CPU. The major architectural difference in A9 is that it has out-of-order execution.

 

[cmaier]

I worked at Exponential, on the x704. I'm just saying.

 

[arn]

Ug. I can only pray to god that Apple doesn't dump Intel and move back to the RISC architecture.

as people have said. Apple is not moving away from Intel for their desktop/laptops. This is iPhone/iPad mobile related only.

arn

 

[cmaier]

By the way, it isn't true that "intrinsity was formerly called exponential."

When exponential went out of business, most of its Austin design team (which was not working on the x704) decided to start a new company called EVSX. This new company eventually became Intrinsity.

Few of the people in Austin had transferred fro
san jose, where the x704 was done.

Might as well say "Apple (formerly Hewlett-packard)..."

 

[iDisk]

We don't know what the Apple A4 is based off of. Everything is just speculation.

And all these marketing checkboxes you list are not ARM Cortex A9 exclusive features. The A8 also has NEON, Thumb-2, Jazelle, TrustZone, etc. In fact, even the ARM11 in the 1st and 2nd gen iPhone and iPod Touch had Thumb, Jazelle, and TrustZone support. And it's unknown whether Apple even uses Jazelle seeing that Java isn't supported or TrustZone anyways.

The ARM Cortex A8 is also a superscalar CPU. The major architectural difference in A9 is that it has out-of-order execution.

Jazelle & Java are probably going to be implemented in future Apple chips designs, cause these benefit multiple cores. (Last I heard Apple wants more cores in these portable devices)

Apple may have these implementations already in the design but will know END of March.

......................

Jazelle may not be in future apple design, cause remembering back to the A6 ARM, it provided no real hardware acceleration, and can actually become a little complex

 

[SirOmega]

I thought domino logic consumed *more* power than standard CMOS logic?

Intel's Pentium 4 used domino logic, and with a long pipeline, cranked up the GHz, but consumed a large amount of power. Intel went back to standard CMOS (with complimentary P and N transistors in a logic gate instead of just N and clock) and along with some algorithmic changes, developed the Pentium M which became the Core Duo and Core 2 Duo.

 

[cmaier]

I thought domino logic consumed *more* power than standard CMOS logic?

Intel's Pentium 4 used domino logic, and with a long pipeline, cranked up the GHz, but consumed a large amount of power. Intel went back to standard CMOS (with complimentary P and N transistors in a logic gate instead of just N and clock) and along with some algorithmic changes, developed the Pentium M which became the Core Duo and Core 2 Duo.

Domino logic does consume more energy, as every gate switches each cycle.

 

[Airforcekid]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

I can't beleave it another shot at a PowerBook G5! The only downside to using there chips would be the loss of windows?

 

[iDisk]

The only downside to using there chips would be the loss of windows?

Sounds like a upside to me