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In the ARM ecosystem, Apple has emerged as one of the only companies building its own highperformance custom CPUs. Other onetime rivals, like Qualcomm, have taken to licensing parts from ARM instead of building their own architectures.
The field, however, isn’t empty Samsung also has a custom CPU designed according to its own criteria. The reason you don’t hear as much about their chips is that previous efforts haven’t been all that great at competing with what Apple and ARM have brought to the table.
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We don’t have a lot of the salient details, but here’s what we know so far. The Exynos 9820 will integrate a brace of Samsung M4 chips (these are its own custom architecture), two Cortex-A75s, and a quad-core of Cortex-A55s.
This type of Big.Little.littlest configuration is more common than it used to be, as companies experiment with deploying multiple types of cores optimized to very specific frequency ranges.
The theoretical upside of this approach is that you can optimize each core more narrowly and specifically, trading die size for efficiency.
This is also a potentially effective way to offset the dark silicon trend, in which manufacturers can put more transistors on a die but lack the power budget to run the entire chip at full power simultaneously.
The downside, at least in theory, is that moving workloads back and forth across cores or attempting to spread a task across a larger group of heterogeneous cores could cost you additional power best spent elsewhere.