This isn't everything, but I find this interesting
Sunny Cove is a fundamentally wider core than most every Intel design since Sandy Bridge, as well, expanding from four-wide issue to five-wide and increasing the number of execution ports from eight to 10. Each of those execution units, in turn, is more capable than those of Skylake. Intel added a dedicated integer divider on port 1 to reduce latency for those operations.
Contrast to
Monsoon (A11) was a major microarchitectural update in terms of the mid-core and backend. It’s there that Apple had shifted the microarchitecture in Hurricane (A10) from a 6-wide decode from to a 7-wide decode. The most significant change in the backend here was the addition of two integer ALU units, upping them from 4 to 6 units.
Monsoon (A11) and Vortex (A12) are extremely wide machines – with 6 integer execution pipelines among which two are complex units, two load/store units, two branch ports, and three FP/vector pipelines this gives an estimated 13 execution ports, far wider than Arm’s upcoming Cortex A76 and also wider than Samsung’s M3. In fact, assuming we're not looking at an atypical shared port situation, Apple’s microarchitecture seems to far surpass anything else in terms of width, including desktop CPUs.
-AT
Intels move up here is great, but for me it also highlights how ambitious this mobile chip was, too ambitious to stay in that space forever imo...
EssKayZee
