Processor companies typically iterate off proven designs, and for good reason. Changing too many things at once introduces a lot of risk. A lot of changing parts makes it hard to get a good picture of overall performance, so it also makes tuning difficult. Pentium 4 and Bulldozer made clean breaks from prior architectures, and…
CPU design is hard. You can tell because there aren't a lot of companies doing it. AMD and Intel are your only choices in the PC scene. In the Android ecosystem, ARM Ltd's cores dominate. Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung and other SoC makers put chips together with varying core counts, GPUs, and other IP blocks. The…
Tech enthusiasts probably know ARM as a company that develops reasonably performant CPU architectures with a focus on power efficiency. Product lines like the Cortex A7xx and Cortex X series use well balanced, moderately sized out-of-order execution engines to achieve those goals. But ARM covers lower power and performance tiers too. Such cores are arguably…