That doesn't answer the question unless we know what fraction of the overall CPU design org the Austin team was. Was CPU design only done on Austin, or was the team in Austin one of many?
That clarifies things, and suggests Samsung is reconsidering its long-term ARM strategy: Exynos processors consistently underperform relative to the Snapdragon versiosn of the same Samsung device, despite what I assume were decades of investment.
Snapdragons are generally more performant with less consumption. Apart from obvious battery life effect, they tend to produce slightly better pictures due to heavy image processing - basically more data available within timeframe available for a snap, without annoying the user with slowness.
That being said, internet rumors are that over time samsung's phones on exynos tend to remain more snappy with various updates compared to snapdragon ones. I doubt anybody did serious comparison, I have s22 ultra with exynos (no other choice in europe) and so far so good.
One data point. I have a s20 ultra since November 2020 (first time Samsung owner), it still feels like new, it's the first phone I've had that hasn't shown its age.
I had Samsung phone with exynos, that thing barely lasts one day on battery. My low-end MotoG can take three days...
In EU Samsung has really bad reputation for putting exynos into high-end Galaxy phones in Europe. There is no way to check before buying, and your phone may last 30% less on battery. It was pretty well documented!
This in no way makes the situation ok, but in my experience the full model number is always possible to find both for shops and contracts and a quick google shows which model has which chip. Most people simply don't care enough and/or are not aware of the difference and don't check this.
No I can't. Shop advertises something like Samsung Galaxy S10 4G Pink. Exact batch numbers are simply not advertised. Only way to check is to open box, start the phone and check About Screen.
I had similar problem with cheap Lenovo. Chinese models were sold in EU, but would not support all local 4G frequencies. But doing this bait&switch with flagship phone is unacceptable!!
I could put up with the lower performance and battery life. What I can't put up with is the trash Mali GPU drivers. Exynos devices are basically DOA for any kind of serious emulation.
Samsung is continuing with Exynos, but they're using ARM Cortex architectures nowadays, as opposed to the in house Mongoose Mx architecture described in this doc (the M6 never made it into a product, and the previous M5, M4, M3 cores were never any better than the contemporaneous ARM competition).
Qualcomm also just uses ARM Cortex nowadays, rather than in-house designs.
Yes, -ish. Qualcomm uses(d) reference designs from ARM from ~2016 to ~2024. Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4, the first Nuvia-designed CPU, is due early next year [1].
Their main issue is not even the design, but manufacturing process - Samsung's "5nm" process for example was underwhelming compared to its TSMC counterpart.
Can anyone here with expertise on branch prediction security give insight into how the mitigation described in Section V compares to the one described in the paper linked below from ARM Research?
I didn't fully read the paper you linked, but I think at a high level the difference is this: the Exynos approach only encrypts the data stored in the branch predictor, while the Arm approach additionally encrypts the index.
The Exynos approach means that if the attacker can find a branch of its own that has a hash collision with the desired victim branch during the course of the victim's lifetime, it can still perform a cross-training attack (however, if the victim exits and is relaunched then the mapping will change and the attacker must start over). This is perhaps unlikely, but the Exynos paper only suggests as a mitigation that the OS periodically change the key, at the expense of mispredictions (see the last paragraph of Section V).
The Arm approach solves this by using a "light-weight set update mechanism" that allows the hardware to automatically change the key periodically without incurring as much overhead. I'd have to read the paper more carefully to understand exactly how it works though.
You mean something like the Android runtime (ART) that comes bundled with Android? Moat apps don't make use of native code, and Google has been making the use if native code more difficult with each subsequent Android release.
