[Galaxy S Advance I9070 Original Android Developmen] juanchotazo99:
Even though x86 processors are CISC in nature, they've been RISC internally since the pentium pro (mid nineties) putting to rest the RISC vs CISC debate forever. The problem now is that AMD has abandoned their brainiac Stars CPU cores for bulldozer speed demons, their very own modern version of intel's netburst. Bad idea... but hey, whatever floats their boat. Their version of hyperthreading by sharing compute resources between both integer cores in a module is great, but if you start with such a low performing design to begin with.. well, you're doing it wrong. Once they're done with bulldozer's 4th revision, Excavator, next year or the other, they'll have to go back to making beefier CPU cores if they ever intend to compete with intel on single threaded performance. (Or, if HSA doesn't take off...) The difference between Kaveri and Haswell clock for clock isn't even funny. They could take their small, cat cores and beef them up. Something alike to what intel did with the pentium M to replace the dead end their netburst was. Remember Tejas? A 150+w, single core, 40 to 50 pipeline stage successor to the prescott pentium 4, that was to debut at 90nm? Good lord, it's great they came to their senses, else we today would be using 200-300w CPUs just like high end GPUs.

It's funny, intel tries to cram x86 into lower power levels while ARM tries to improve performance with their newest designs while sacrificing their low power and efficiency (they are running out of low hanging fruit in their designs, it's gonna cost them a lot when you're using automated, synthetizable designs not hand tuned for efficiency/ultra low power/etc on a specific process, unlike intel.. although they've refined cortex A15 enough that they're back to normal, check the latest A15s implemented into nvidia's tegra K1). It's nice to see such convergence between both companies. It'll be nice, too, to see what cortex A57/A53 brings the next year or the other, I don't know when their partners plan to bring new SoCs to the market with these new CPU cores. Intel has put atom on their tick tock schedule, so in a not so distant future we'll see silvermont in 14nm, airmont. The battle heats up!

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I do know they are very different architectures. I do know they target completely different markets and power/performance targets. You do not have to explain any of it, if it wasn't clear already you are talking with someone well versed in these matters. If you have the need to explain in order for the rest of the forum members then that's fine, but not needed with me. I mentioned the anecdotical, historical overvolting of AMD processors as a simple, amusing, comparison. I even mentioned in my post that it was unrealistic to expect such a voltage excedent at stock on a phone SoC where every mV of supply and every mW dissipated counts. But there's always some headroom either up or down the curve. That was the point.

BTW, I just ran CPU-z and it reports the A9s in our U8500 SoC are revision r2p1. Samsung's exynos 4410 is also based on r2p1 A9s. Hm. Better process on samsung's part, then, or just better binning of their chips. The A9 architecture is 8-11 pipeline stages deep depending on what code it's executing, it isn't designed to clock high, but there has to be some headroom left we can take advantage of.

Anyway, once there is a clear way from cocafe to let us test voltages and clock speeds (with due warnings to noobs who will probably brick their phones with silly voltages) then we'll see what STE's little U8500 is capable of.