ARM Cortex-A73


The ARM Cortex-A73 is a microarchitecture implementing the ARMv8-A 64-bit instruction set designed by ARM Holdings' Sophia design centre. The Cortex-A73 is a 2-wide decode out-of-order superscalar pipeline. The Cortex-A73 serves as the successor of the Cortex-A72, designed to offer 30% greater performance or 30% increased power efficiency.

Design

The design of the Cortex-A73 is based on the 32-bit ARMv7-A Cortex-A17, emphasizing power efficiency and sustained peak performance. The Cortex-A73 is primarily targeted at mobile computing. In reviews, the Cortex-A73 showed improved integer instructions per clock, though lower floating point IPC, relative to the Cortex-A72.

Licensing

The Cortex-A73 is available as SIP core to licensees, and its design makes it suitable for integration with other SIP cores into one die constituting a system on a chip.
The Cortex-A73 is also the first ARM core to be modified through ARM's semi-custom 'Built on ARM' license. The Kryo 280 was the first released semi-custom product, though the modifications made relative to the stock Cortex-A73 were not announced.

Products

The HiSilicon Kirin 960, released in 2016, utilizes 4 Cortex-A73 cores as the 'big' cores in a big.LITTLE arrangement with 4 'little' ARM Cortex-A53 cores.
The MediaTek Helio X30 utilizes 2 Cortex-A73 cores as the 'big' cores in deca-core big.LITTLE arrangement with 4 Cortex-A53 and 4 Cortex-A35 'little' cores.
The Kryo 280, released in March 2017 by Qualcomm in the Snapdragon 835, uses a modified Cortex-A73 core. The SoC utilizes 8 Kryo 280 cores in a big.LITTLE arrangement as two 4-core blocks, clocked at 2.456 GHz and 1.906 GHz. The modifications made by Qualcomm relative to the stock Cortex-A73 core are unknown, and the resulting Kryo 280 core demonstrated increased integer IPC. The Kryo 260 also used Cortex-A73 cores, though at lower clock speeds than the Kryo 280 and in combination with Cortex-A53 cores.
The Cortex-A73 is also found in a wide range of mid-range chipsets such as the Samsung Exynos, MediaTek Helio P series, and other HiSilicon Kirin models. Like the Snapdragon 636/660, most of these chipsets implement 4 A73 cores and 4 A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration, although some lower end models of Samsung chips implement only 2 A73 cores with 6 A53 cores.