A8’s CPU: What Comes After Cyclone?

Despite the importance of the CPU in Apple’s SoC designs, it continues to be surprising just how relatively little we know about their architectures even years after the fact. Even though the CPU was so important that Apple saw the need to create their own custom design, and then did two architectures in just the span of two years, they are not fond of talking about just what it is they have done with their architectures. This, unfortunately, is especially the case at the beginning of an SoC’s lifecycle, and for A8 it isn’t going to be any different.

Overall, from what we can tell the CPU in the A8 is not a significant departure from the CPU in A7, but that is not a bad thing. With Cyclone Apple hit on a very solid design: use a wide, high-IPC design with great latency in order to reach high performance levels at low clock speeds. By keeping the CPU wide and the clock speed low, Apple was able to hit their performance goals without having to push the envelope on power consumption, as lower clock speeds help keep CPU power use in check. It’s all very Intel Core-like, all things considered. Furthermore given the fact that Cyclone was a forward-looking design with ARMv8 AArch64 capabilities and already strong performance, Apple does not face the same pressure to overhaul their CPU architecture like other current ARMv7 CPU designers do.


Close Up: "Enhanced Cyclone"

As a result, from the information we have been able to dig up and the tests we have performed, the A8 CPU is not radically different from Cyclone. To be sure there are some differences that make it clear that this is not just a Cyclone running at slightly higher clock speeds, but we have not seen the same kind of immense overhaul that defined Swift and Cyclone.

Unfortunately Apple has tightened up on information leaks and unintentional publications more than ever with A8, so the amount of information coming out of Apple about this new core is very limited. In fact this time around we don’t even know the name of the CPU. For the time being we are calling it "Enhanced Cyclone" – it’s descriptive of the architecture – but we’re fairly certain that it does have a formal name within Apple to set it apart from Cyclone, a name we hope to discover sooner than later.

In any case one of the things we do know about Enhanced Cyclone is that unlike Apple’s GPU of choice for A8, Apple has seen a significant reduction in the die size of the CPU coming from the 28nm A7 to the 20nm A8. Chipworks’ estimates put the die size of Cyclone at 17.1mm2 versus 12.2mm2 for Enhanced Cyclone. On a relative basis this means that Enhanced Cyclone is 71% the size of Cyclone, which even after accounting for less-than-perfect area scaling still means that Enhanced Cyclone is a relatively bigger CPU composed of more transistors than Cyclone was. It is not dramatically bigger, but it’s bigger to such a degree that it’s clear that Apple has made further improvements over Cyclone.

The question of the moment is what Apple has put their additional transistors and die space to work on. Some of that is no doubt the memory interface, which as we’ve seen earlier L3 cache access times are nearly 20ns faster in our benchmarks. But if we dig deeper things start becoming very interesting.

Apple Custom CPU Core Comparison
  Apple A7 Apple A8
CPU Codename Cyclone "Enhanced Cyclone"
ARM ISA ARMv8-A (32/64-bit) ARMv8-A (32/64-bit)
Issue Width 6 micro-ops 6 micro-ops
Reorder Buffer Size 192 micro-ops 192 micro-ops?
Branch Mispredict Penalty 16 cycles (14 - 19) 16 (14 - 19)?
Integer ALUs 4 4
Load/Store Units 2 2
Addition (FP) Latency 5 cycles 4 cycles
Multiplication (INT) Latency 4 cycles 3 cycles
Branch Units 2 2
Indirect Branch Units 1 1
FP/NEON ALUs 3 3
L1 Cache 64KB I$ + 64KB D$ 64KB I$ + 64KB D$
L2 Cache 1MB 1MB
L3 Cache 4MB 4MB

First and foremost, in much of our testing Enhanced Cyclone performs very similarly to Cyclone. Accounting for the fact that A8 is clocked at 1.4GHz versus 1.3GHz for A7, in many low-level benchmarks the two perform as if they are the same processor. Based on this data it looks like the fundamentals of Cyclone have not been changed for Enhanced Cyclone. Enhanced Cyclone is still a very wide six micro-op architecture, and branch misprediction penalties are similar so that it’s likely we’re looking at the same pipeline length.

However from our low-level tests two specific features stand out: integer multiplication and floating point addition. When it comes to integer multiplication Cyclone had a single multiplication unit and it took four cycles to execute. However against Enhanced Cyclone those operations are now measuring in at three cycles to execute. But more surprising is the total Integer multiplication throughput rate; integer multiplication performance has now more than doubled. While this doesn’t give us enough data to completely draw out Enhanced Cyclone’s integer pathways, all of the data points to Enhanced Cyclone doubling up on its integer multiplication units, meaning Apple’s latest architecture now has two such units.

Meanwhile floating point addition shows similar benefits, though not as great as integer multiplication. Throughput is such that there appears to still be three FP ALUs, but like integer multiplication the instruction latency has been reduced. Apple has managed to shave off a cycle on FP addition, so it now completes in four cycles instead of five. Both of these improvements indicate that Enhanced Cyclone is not identical to Cyclone – the additional INT MUL unit in particular – making them very similar but still subtly different CPU architectures.


Apple iPhone Performance Estimates: Over The Years

Outside of these low-level operations, most other aspects of Enhanced Cyclone seem unchanged. L1 cache remains at 64KB I$ + 64KB D$ per CPU core, where it was most recently doubled for Cyclone. For L2 cache Chipworks believes that there may be separate L2 caches for each CPU core, and while L2 cache bandwidth is looking a little better on Enhanced Cyclone than on Cyclone, it’s not a “smoking gun” that would prove the presence of separate L2 caches. And of course, the L3 cache stands at 4MB, with the aforementioned improvements in latency that we’ve seen.

To borrow an Intel analogy once more, the layout and performance of Enhanced Cyclone relative to Cyclone is quite similar to Intel’s more recent ticks, where smaller feature improvements take place alongside a die shrink. In this case Apple has their die shrink to 20nm; meanwhile they have made some small tweaks to the architecture to improve performance across several scenarios. At the same time Apple has made a moderate bump in clock speed from 1.3GHz to 1.4GHz, but it’s nothing extreme. Ultimately while two CPU architectures does not constitute a pattern, if Apple were to implement tick-tock then this is roughly what it would look like.

Moving on, after completing our low-level tests we also wanted to spend some time comparing Enhanced Cyclone with its predecessor on some high level tests. The low-level tests can tell us if individual operations have been improved while high level tests can tell us something about what the performance impact will be in realistic workloads.

For our first high level benchmark we turn to SPECint2000. Developed by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, SPECint2000 is the integer component of their larger SPEC CPU2000 benchmark. Designed around the turn of the century, officially SPEC CPU2000 has been retired for PC processors, but with mobile processors roughly a decade behind their PC counterparts in performance, SPEC CPU2000 is currently a very good fit for the capabilities of Cyclone and Enhanced Cyclone.

SPECint2000 is composed of 12 benchmarks which are then used to compute a final peak score. Though in our case we’re more interested in the individual results.

SPECint2000 - Estimated Scores
  A8 A7 % Advantage
164.gzip
842
757
11%
175.vpr
1228
1046
17%
176.gcc
1810
1466
23%
181.mcf
1420
915
55%
186.crafty
2021
1687
19%
197.parser
1129
947
19%
252.eon
1933
1641
17%
253.perlbmk
1666
1349
23%
254.gap
1821
1459
24%
255.vortex
1716
1431
19%
256.bzip2
1234
1034
19%
300.twolf
1633
1473
10%

Keeping in mind that A8 is clocked 100MHz (~7.7%) higher than A7, all of the SPECint2000 benchmarks show performance gains above and beyond the clock speed increase, indicating that every benchmark has benefited in some way. Of these benchmarks MCF, GCC, PerlBmk and GAP in particular show the greatest gains, at anywhere between 20% and 55%. Roughly speaking anything that is potentially branch-heavy sees some of the smallest gains while anything that plays into the multiplication changes benefits more.

MCF, a combinatorial optimization benchmark, ends up being the outlier here by far. Given that these are all integer benchmarks, it may very well be that MCF benefits from the integer multiplication improvements the most, as its performance comes very close to tracking the 2X increase in multiplication throughput. This also bodes well for any other kind of work that is similarly bounded by integer multiplication performance, though such workloads are not particularly common in the real world of smartphone use.

Our other set of comparison benchmarks comes from Geekbench 3. Unlike SPECint2000, Geekbench 3 is a mix of integer and floating point workloads, so it will give us a second set of eyes on the integer results along with a take on floating point improvements.

Geekbench 3 - Integer Performance
  A8 A7 % Advantage
AES ST
992.2 MB/s
846.8 MB/s
17%
AES MT
1.93 GB/s
1.64 GB/s
17%
Twofish ST
58.8 MB/s
55.6 MB/s
5%
Twofish MT
116.8 MB/s
110.0 MB/s
6%
SHA1 ST
495.1 MB/s
474.8 MB/s
4%
SHA1 MT
975.8 MB/s
937 MB/s
4%
SHA2 ST
109.9 MB/s
102.2 MB/s
7%
SHA2 MT
219.4 MB/
204.4 MB/s
7%
BZip2Comp ST
5.24 MB/s
4.53 MB/s
15%
BZip2Comp MT
10.3 MB/s
8.82 MB/s
16%
Bzip2Decomp ST
8.4 MB/
7.6 MB/s
10%
Bzip2Decomp MT
16.5 MB/s
15 MB/s
10%
JPG Comp ST
19 MP/s
16.8 MPs
13%
JPG Comp MT
37.6 MP/s
33.3 MP/s
12%
JPG Decomp ST
45.9 MP/s
39 MP/s
17%
JPG Decomp MT
89.3 MP/s
77.1 MP/s
15%
PNG Comp ST
1.26 MP/s
1.14 MP/s
10%
PNG Comp MT
2.51 MP/s
2.26 MP/s
11%
PNG Decomp ST
17.4 MP/s
15.1 MP/s
15%
PNG Decomp MT
34.3 MPs
29.6 MP/s
15%
Sobel ST
71.7 MP/s
58.1 MP/s
23%
Sobel MT
137.1 MP/s
112.4 MP/s
21%
Lua ST
1.64 MB/s
1.34 MB/s
22%
Lua MT
3.22 MB/s
2.64 MB/s
21%
Dijkstra ST
5.57 Mpairs/s
4.04 Mpairs/s
37%
Dijkstra MT
9.43 Mpairs/s
7.26 Mpairs/s
29%

Geekbench’s integer results are overall a bit more muted than SPECint2000’s, but there are still some definite high points and low points among these benchmarks. Crypto performance is among the lesser gains, while Sobel and Dijkstra are among the largest at 21% and 37% respectively. Interestingly in the case of Dijkstra, this does make up for the earlier performance loss Cyclone saw on this benchmark in the move to 64-bit.

Geekbench 3 - Floating Point Performance
  A8 A7 % Advantage
BlackScholes ST
7.85 Mnodes/s
5.89 Mnodes/s
33%
BlackScholes MT
15.5 Mnodes/s
11.8 Mnodes/s
31%
Mandelbrot ST
1.18 GFLOPS
929.4 MFLOPS
26%
Mandelbrot MT
2.34 GFLOPS
1.85 GFLOPS
26%
Sharpen Filter ST
981.7 MFLOPS
854 MFLOPS
14%
Sharpen Filter MT
1.94 MFLOPS
1.7 GFLOPS
14%
Blur Filter ST
1.41 GFLOPS
1.26 GFLOPS
11%
Blur Filter MT
2.78 GFLOPS
2.49 GFLOPS
11%
SGEMM ST
3.83 GFLOPS
3.44 GFLOPS
11%
SGEMM MT
7.48 GFLOPS
6.4 GFLOPS
16%
DGEMM ST
1.87 GFLOPS
1.68 GFLOPS
11%
DGEMM MT
3.61 GFLOPS
3.14 GFLOPS
14%
SFFT ST
1.77 GFLOPS
1.59 GFLOPS
11%
SFFT MT
3.47 GFLOPS
3.18 GFLOPS
9%
DFFT ST
1.68 GFLOPS
1.47 GFLOPS
14%
DFFT MT
3.29 GFLOPS
2.93 GFLOPS
12%
N-Body ST
735.8 Kpairs/s
587.8 Kpairs/s
25%
N-Body MT
1.46 Mpairs/s
1.17 Mpairs/s
24%
Ray Trace ST
2.76 MP/s
2.23 MP/s
23%
Ray Trace MT
5.45 MP/s
4.49 MP/s
21%

While the low-level floating point tests we ran earlier didn’t show as significant a change in the floating point performance of the architecture as it did the integer, our high level benchmarks show that floating point tests are actually faring rather well. Which goes to show that not everything can be captured in low level testing, especially less tangible aspects such as instruction windows. More importantly though this shows that Enhanced Cyclone’s performance gains aren’t just limited to integer workloads but cover floating point as well.

Overall, even without a radical change in architecture, thanks to a combination of clock speed increases, architectural optimizations, and memory latency improvements, Enhanced Cyclone as present in the A8 SoC is looking like a solid step up in performance from Cyclone and the A7. Over the next year Apple is going to face the first real competition in the ARMv8 64-bit space from Cortex-A57 and other high performance designs, and while it’s far too early to guess how those will compare, at the very least we can say that Apple will be going in with a strong hand. More excitingly, most of these performance improvements build upon Apple’s already strong single-threaded IPC, which means that in those stubborn workloads that don’t benefit from multi-core scaling Apple is looking very good.

A8: Apple’s First 20nm SoC A8’s GPU: Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR GX6450
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  • akdj - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link

    Who uses their smartphone to sit and look at the UI? Or. Thats right. You. Can't find any apps that'll work? I'm on my springboard for a second or three. Like you said, pull down, enter the first letter or two of the software/app I'm going to use and click, it's open!
    No more just looking at the 'floating (?) blobs that sit in rows (like Android)non a screen. Designed for teenagers, grandmas, commercial and military pilots. Military operations you're clueless about and 95% of the Fortune 500 companies have deployed iOS.
    And unfortunately for you, if you're NOT an iOS user, I completely 'get it'. I've got both an iPhone 5s and Note 3. Love em both but the Note is a tool for a very specific job I so that uses the SPen to do some amazing stuff that wouldn't be as 'cool' as on graph paper. Other than that, I don't care the app you name, Id it's in parity with iOS, I GUARANTEED iOS runs circles around the Android port. As well the optomized tablet apps are overwhelmingly in favor of iOS, and the biggest challenge with the the Note in different apps I've noticed. They're apps designed for 4.3-4.7" displays and the developers aren't tsking the time to 're-do' their tab apps. They're just blown up leaving a load of white space, sparse UI and pretty lame performance as they're not yet 'coding' to take advantage of multiple core computing. Nearly EVERY app in either environment runs on a single core.
    Mind blowing though you've spent that much time looking at 'blobs' and haven't figured out that IF you TOUCH the 'blob' something really REALLY Cool might just happen!
    Go ahead. You won't break it
    J
  • steven75 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Smaller phones tend to be cheaper? The rest cost the same? No, a single part like the display could be cheaper, but there are very real costs to miniaturization.

    Samsung phones not only look cheap because of the plastic, they feel cheap in hand as well. It's not the material--It's what Samsung does with it. Nokia for instance makes some plastic phones that look good and feel great. Samsung comes out with phones that look like band-aids and have fake leather stitching molded into them.
  • danbob999 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    There you go. Samsung phones are not cheap. You *think* they *feel* cheap. That's your opinion and not based on any fact. Whether a phone is cheap has nothing to do with look or feel.

    And yes, smaller phones ARE cheaper. The iPhone 6 Plus is more expensive to make. The A8 SoC and all other chips are not smaller in the iPhone 6 so there is no additional miniaturization. Only the display and the battery are smaller, and both are cheaper. iFixit teardowns have shown for years that Galaxy S-series are most expensive to make than iPhones.
  • mrochester - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Doesn't that mean Apple did a good thing? To make a product like the iPhone for less than it costs Samsung to make their Galaxy devices sounds like a big win to me.
  • danbob999 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Of course it is a win for Apple and their shareholders. Not for their customers.
    Of course it is cheaper to put half the RAM, a small display and a small battery.
  • bigstrudel - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    RAM has power costs idiot. It's not worth it just so lazy people don't have to close tabs.

    You must've missed the part where they tested that 1800mah battery and it beat up on devices with 50% more juice.
  • danbob999 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    I am not saying the iPhone is a bad device.
    But don't call cheap a phone with more expensive components juste because the shell is in plastic. That's all I am saying.
  • mrochester - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    I think the expression was relating to the device feeling cheap in the hand, not the actual BOM.
  • danbob999 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    @mrochester
    Is this a tech site or a teenager fashion magazine? Why would anyone care about how cheap it feels in the hand as long as it is a good device?
    A metal enclosure with no electronics in it may not feel cheap in the hand but it would be useless. What matters is inside.
  • Hemlocke - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Not true, even in the slightest. The thermal envelope on a material with superior heat-dissipating properties, like 6003 aluminum, versus that of a polycarbonate device, with a poor thermal envelope, is important.

    Having superior heat-dissipating properties means your components can operate at capacity longer, and they also last longer. All you need to do is look at throttling on the S5, compared to the HTC One M8, and you can see a huge difference in extended performance.

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