New ARM Cortex A78C: the architecture to compete against Macs with ARM

All smartphones sold in Spain have one thing in common, and that is the use of a processor with ARM architecture. These processors have radically evolved in recent times, being capable of rivaling in performance against Intel and AMD computer processors with x86 architecture, but with greater energy efficiency.

This efficiency allows for equal performance, energy consumption to be much lower, something that has been evident in the new Apple computers, which saw how their autonomy was capable of growing up to 15-20 hours of use. Apple is not the only one working to bring this efficiency to computers, as ARM itself has created its own design.

Can Android create a rival for newer ARM-powered Macs?

The new Mac with ARM processor are already here, and given the change in architecture we wonder if Android could compete by using similar processors.

The ARM Cortex A78C are the new rival for the Apple M1

Despite the fact that Apple is usually a company that is not usually very disruptive, but when they bet big, they do it in style. Macbooks with an ARM processor have been the“One More Thing”of 2020, and although they are not the first computer with ARM, the fact that those of Cupertino bet on this architecture for their arrangements is a signal for many other manufacturers.

Not that ARM saw yesterday the announcement of the new Macs and invented a new architecture in a matter of hours, since in fact the new Cortex A78C were presented by the company a few days ago without making much noise. Even without being a great launch, this architecture has great interest in the future that ARM represents for computers.

The Cortex A78Cs were introduced before the Apple M1, but will hit the market later.

The A78C architecture is a variant of the Cortex A78, high-performance cores that are called to give life to the high-end processors of 2021, such as the Snapdragon 875 that should be presented next December.

At the performance level, the Cortex A78Cs do not represent a great leap in terms of architecture, and the main change with respect to the version on which it is based is that it has a larger shared L3 cache. The reason for this increase in the third-level cache is because it is usually shared between the cores, and this is where the biggest difference would be.

ARM processors raise the bar to the extreme: new A78, X1, and Mali G78 / G68

The new ARM A78 and X1 processors take a new step forward in performance and power consumption, accompanied by new graphics.

The Cortex A78 architecture only allows four cores of this architecture to be stacked in each module, these being accompanied by 4 low-performance cores. The Cortex A78C allow an 8-core design, in which all can be nuclei of high performance, instead of the usual configuration that we see in mobiles where only 4 cores are high performance and the other 4 are intended for energy efficiency.

Given its growth in performance and consumption, this architecture is focused on devices that by physical space have a larger battery, so it is expected that in the coming months we will know specialized ARM processors for computers and that are not like the current Snapdragon 8CX, chips that although optimized for computers, did not represent a jump in performance compared to the version on which they were based.

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