When Chinese chip maker Rockchip launched its RK3288 processor earlier this year there was some confusion about whether it was based on ARM Cortex-A12 or Cortex-A17 designs.

It turns out it doesn’t matter: ARM says that while the two types of chips were originally designed to offer different performance levels, but due to demand for better performance and efficiency, ARM Cortex-A12 and Cortex-A17 are effectively identical.

ca17

In fact, ARM doesn’t even plan to use the Cortex-A12 name anymore and will refer to all of the designs in this category as Cortex-A17.

Cortex-A17 chips offer 60 percent more single-threader performance than a Cortex-A9 chip at the same clock speed, while also offering better efficiency.

These are still mid-range chips that aren’t in the same class as the Cortex-A57 designs based on ARMv8 architecture. But if you’ve been spending the last year wondering whether Rockchip’s latest processor was a Cortex-A12 or Cortex-A17 chip now you can move on to other pursuits.

via MiniMachines

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4 replies on “ARM Cortex-A12 and Cortex-A17 chips are identical”

  1. While the Cortex-A12 and Cortex-A17 are approximately equivalent, I still do not believe the Cortex-A12 as implemented in the RK3288 as as fast as the real Cortex-A17 running at the same clock speed. ARM specifically states that the latest revision of Cortex-A12 performs at the level of the Cortex-A17, and the same most likely is true for older revision of Cortex-A12 used in the RK3288 (that is, of course, until Rockchip updates their Cortex-A12 core to a recent version).

    Based on my analysis of the Geekbench results database (https://browser.primatelabs.com/), it looks to me like the real Cortex-A17 in new chips such as MediaTek’s MT6595 is about 13% faster clock-for-clock than the Cortex-A12 inside the RK3288, which would also put RK3288’s Cortex-A12 somewhat below typical Cortex-A15 performance (reference: https://mobilesemi.blogspot.com/2014/11/analysis-of-tablet-processors-by-chip.html).

    Rockchip is one of the few known customers (virtually the only one) of Cortex-A12 through its foundry Global Foundries (which made Cortex-A12 available early) and it would have been convenient for both ARM and Rockchip to settle this issue since Rockchip had already been advertising the RK3288 as having Cortex-A17 for some time.

    Overall, it does not matter very much because both the Cortex-A12 inside the RK3288 produces performance in the same ballpark as Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A17, which is a lot faster than previous cores such as Cortex-A9 or power-efficient cores such as Cortex-A7. The CPU performance is plenty for a mobile device. More critical would be power efficiency and other factors (such as the memory interface and memory bandwidth which seem to be a bit low for the RK3288 despite the use of a dual-channel (64-bit total) external memory interface, which can explain the performance drop-off from 720p to 1080p in games).

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