Samsung: Arm Cortex-A76 at 7nm will be able to run at 3GHz

Samsung plans 7nm and 5nm Arm CPUs

Samsung claims to have achieved clock speeds of 3GHz for its forthcoming Arm Cortex-A76 implementation built on its 7nm Low Power Plus (LPP) process technology.

And the company is planning to push-on early to 5nm, enabling it to wring even more performance out of the Arm chip.

The development was revealed at the Samsung Foundry Forum 2018 in South Korea yesterday, when the company revealed that its 7nm LPP process will be ready to start production before the end of the year.

The first extreme ultra violet (EUV) lithography process technology, and its key IPs, are in development and expected to be completed by the first half of 2019, the company's statement added. The 5nm Low Power Early (LPE) process will enable even greater scaling and more power-efficiency.

Those key IPs refer to ARM's Artisan physical IP solutions which is a core-hardening acceleration technology. These are apparently being developed on its latest processor cores with a goal to deliver the next generation of advanced system-on-chips from mobile to hyperscale data centres.

ARM's Artisan physical IP platforms include Logic IP, Embedded Memory Compilers, and Interface IP optimised for each foundry and process technology from 250nm to 7nm.

The company claims that these productions ease implementation challenges for advanced nodes to accelerate core hardening, speed SoC implementation and reduce project risks for IC design.

"Collaboration with ARM in the fields of IP solutions is crucial to increase high-performance computing power and accelerate the growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning capabilities," said Samsung's vice president of the Foundry Marketing Team, Ryan Sanghyun Lee.

Samsung and TSMC are leading the race towards commercial 7nm and 5nm microprocessors - close to the physical limits of Moore's law. It is believed that it might be possible to shrink CPU nodes to 3nm, using extreme ultraviolet lithographic tools, with 5nm products possibly appearing as early as 2021.

GlobalFoundries is also planning to produce 7nm AMD Ryzen microprocessors early next year - all the while Intel is struggling to shift its processes from 14nm to 10nm.