Arm Cortex M7 is completely different from Arm Cortex A53. The A53 I see as a proper Intel Atom competitor, the Cortex M7 is something I'd expect to be found (typically) in a very-low end setting, like the controller for a mouse or keyboard.
Atom clearly shrinks down to Arm Cortex-A53 levels, but to pretend that Arm Cortex-A53 and M7 are similar is to be disingenuous.
> There's a HUGE difference between Arm-M (like the M7 in the Intel chip) and ARM-A cores (like the A76 or A53 in your phone).
The M7 core is for real time code, power and sleep management, and offloading small processes that would waste too much power waking up the main cores. It's not meant to be powerful, it's meant to be ultra low power.
I don't know why you'd expect it to be an A53 or A76 core. Those are much more complicated, power hungry, and are made redundant by the x64 cores.
> I don't know why you'd expect it to be an A53 or A76 core.
Your reading of my words seems mistaken. Under no point do I allege that Intel should be using a Cortex-A core. I'm simply pointing out that Cortex-M and Cortex-A are grossly different.
Read the thread again: many people here are confusing M and A cores: as if all ARM chips are the same or something.
Intel decided to leave the low-margin microcontroller business a long time ago. ARM may have gobbled up the market, but there's an entire graveyard of companies who were unable to make it in that highly competitive market.
The Cortex-M world is dominated by peripherals, more so than core performance. A faster or more-accurate 12-bit ADC is what makes your company live or die (or STM's "op-amps on board", which reduce the need of external opamps, a singular opamp + cortex-M3 chip is all you need). Integration is key, not so much performance or even power-efficiency.
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In any case, I stand by my primary claim: ARM Cortex-M chips do NOT compete against Intel in any capacity. They're a completely different market. Intel doesn't have the technical expertise needed to make ADCs, Timers, or Op-amps like say, ST-Micro or TI. (Lower-power OpAmps, higher-frequency, lower-input current, lower output impedance, compatibility with a wider variety of voltages from 1V to 5V... etc. etc. ).
I think the issue here is that 'workloads' in the original piece is not meant to refer to user workloads - and no comparison is made with the A-53 in the article.
Incidentally, interesting that Intel can use a low margin Arm core to enhance it's offering that competes against higher margin Arm cores. It will be interesting to see if this sort of thing survives the Nvidia takeover.
Arm Cortex M7 is completely different from Arm Cortex A53. The A53 I see as a proper Intel Atom competitor, the Cortex M7 is something I'd expect to be found (typically) in a very-low end setting, like the controller for a mouse or keyboard.
Atom clearly shrinks down to Arm Cortex-A53 levels, but to pretend that Arm Cortex-A53 and M7 are similar is to be disingenuous.
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EDIT: Case in point, here's the first Cortex-M7 on Digikey that I found: https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/stmicroelectronics...
There's a HUGE difference between Arm-M (like the M7 in the Intel chip) and ARM-A cores (like the A76 or A53 in your phone).