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The Loongson is a 90nm part, the others are 32-45nm. No ISA is going to make up for a doubled transistor size.

Really the notable thing to me isn't the ISA nonsense at all. It's how singular a success the Cortex A9 core is. It came at exactly the right moment in history and hit exactly the right sweet spot, being significantly beefier than the A8 yet only minimally more power-hungry. Krait has followed on pretty well, but the A15 can almost be considered a failure at this point.



As mentioned in a different comment here, all the results were scaled to 45nm@1GHz, and while that's not totally accurate, there's still a big gap between it and the ARMs/x86s.

It would be interesting to see how the A7 also compares to the A8/A9, since it's supposed to be a more power-efficient version of the A15.


Yeah, based on just the data in this article, I would see A9 as preferable to A15 for using as the CPU of a mobile device.


Definitely, though wasn't the A15 designed for more of a compact server role? IIRC the A15 had different design goals.


Ok, I' would believe that. I don't know much about the correspondence between A8/A9/A15 and real-world devices.




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