About two years ago I got an idea of gathering information about AArch64 SoCs. Mostly to have a place to show how many of them are still using outdated v8.0 cpu cores.
During those years many things changed. And there were funny moments too.
v8.0 moved to the past
Current stats of table are:
| ISA level | Amount of SoC entries |
|---|---|
| v8.0 | 89 |
| v8.1 | 1 |
| v8.2 | 58 |
| v8.4 | 1 |
| v8.5 | 6 |
| v8.6 | 8 |
| v9.0 | 24 |
| v9.2 | 8 |
Architecture updates are present on a market. More and more SoC vendors go for newer designs instead of staying in the past. Most of those cases are mobile phones. Cloud systems also moved to the new designs as we have Arm Neoverse-V2 based instances available at several places.
Arm core information table
As most of SoC vendors switched to use Arm designs I decided to create a table which would show some more information about them. And created AArch64 cpu core information table.
It lists all Arm designs (Cortex-A/X, Neoverse) with direct links to their TRM documentation, ID numbers, memory sizes, supported page sizes, SVE vector length and level on AArch32 support.
Code is open enough to handle also designs from other SoC vendors but I have not seen such documentation being present in public.
Adding new SoC
Anyone can submit a new entry as a new issue on Github. And most people used that way. It is also recommended way.
New features
There is a column about AArch32 support. Most of v8.x SoCs supports running 32-bit binaries, some support booting 32-bit kernels. v9.x ones finally get rid of any kind of 32-bit support.
At some point I added links to Arm core TRMs (Technical Reference Manuals). Then added information when SoC was announced so it can be seen how new/old it is.
Interesting/funny moments
There are funny moments sometimes after several updates. In January 2023 I added Alibaba Yitian 710 SoC to the table. It was the first Neoverse-N2 system there.
About month later some random person wrote to me on IRC:
I’m glad you put the Yitian 710 in your table, now I can point people at it, and tell them to look at that for what processor its using.
Other interesting example: Longhorn published information for NVIDIA Grace SoC when those systems were quite rare.
Or Jeff Geerling started reviewing AmpereOne system and published data for Ampere1A (AC04) cpu core which was not yet in a table. There was public information that AC04 exists but no cpuinfo data for it.
End words
When I created this table I have not thought that it will get that popular. Now it feels like when device with a new SoC appears on a market someone sends me data for a new entry.
I automated most of work related to maintaining the table so project will stay for as long as people will send me data for it.