Exynos 1080 High-performance, low-power CPU and GPU with AMIGO

Abstract

This work presents Exynos 1080, mobile SOC which is productized in Samsung 5nm EUV technology. It is extremely power-efficient SOC which possesses four Cortex-A78 and four Cortex-A55. A Cortex-A78 is clocked at 2.8GHz and three Cortex-A78 cores are clocked at 2.6GHz. Four Cortex-A55 cores run at 2 GHz and handle light tasks. It also features the Mali-G78 MP10 GPU supporting Full HD+ displays with a 144Hz refresh rate or QHD+ displays with a 90Hz refresh rate. High-performance and low-power CPU and GPU in this work empower performance hungry mobile application. We demonstrate the architecture change to improve CPU and GPU performance compared to previous mobile processor, Exynos 980. CPU and GPU are implemented for optimal power efficiency by careful balancing of voltages and leakages, with considering heavy load scenarios. When a game scene is getting heavier, the utilization of CPU, GPU and memory controller increases and each DVFS driver changes their frequency with own policy to handle the work. Each can try to increase performance without considering other’s behavior. It leads total power increase. To solve this problem, we create AMIGO (Advanced Multi-IP Governor). It collects CPU, GPU, and memory controller data and analyzes collected data. It then decides which IP shall be boosted or suppressed to achieve target FPS or optimizes power usages of CPU, GPU, and memory controller. Amigo achieves the game power reduction by 15% on average. With high-performance CPU and GPU, Exynos 1080’s Antutu score is 89% higher than Exynos 980. The smart phones with Exynos 1080 were successfully launched in DEC 2020.