Evolution of the Samsung Exynos CPU Microarchitecture
Brian Grayson, Jeff Rupley, Gerald D Zuraski, Eric Quinnell, Daniel A. Jiménez, Tarun Nakra, Paul Kitchin, Ryan Hensley, Edward Brekelbaum, Vikas Sinha, Ankit Ghiya · 2020
The Samsung Exynos family of cores are highperformance “big” processors developed at the Samsung Austin Research & Design Center (SARC) starting in late 2011. This paper discusses selected aspects of the microarchitecture of these cores - specifically perceptron-based branch prediction, Spectre v2 security enhancements, micro-operation cache algorithms, prefetcher advancements, and memory latency optimizations. Each micro-architecture item evolved over time, both as part of continuous yearly improvement, and in reaction to changing mobile workloads.