Intel Shows 14nm Broadwell Consuming 30% Less Power Than 22nm Haswell 88
MojoKid writes "Kirk Skaugen, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the PC Client Group at Intel, while on stage, at IDF this week snuck in some additional information about Broadwell, the 14nm follow up to Haswell that was mentioned during Brian Krzanich's opening day keynote. In a quick demo, Kirk showed a couple of systems running the Cinebench multi-threaded benchmark side-by-side. One of the systems featured a Haswell-Y processor, the other a Broadwell-Y. The benchmark results weren't revealed, but during the Cinebench run, power was being monitored on both systems and it showed the Broadwell-Y rig consuming roughly 30% less power than Haswell-Y and running fully loaded at under 5 watts. Without knowing clocks and performance levels, we can't draw many conclusion from the power numbers shown, but they do hint at Broadwell-Y's relative health, even at this early stage of the game."
ARM (Score:2, Interesting)
Arm meanwhile has 8 core processors suitable for Smartphones (and yes they can run all 8 cores simultaneously).
What they need right now is an a chip *now* that is 30% less power THAN AN EQUIVALENT ARM, and more cores and cheaper, oh and it also needs to be SOC available.
Really saying you're next chip is 30% lower power than one you just launched, means the one you just launched is 30% too much power drawn. Which is true, but not something to point out.
Re:How much does this help? (Score:2, Interesting)
Pretty huge.
1) means smaller design, which means you can pack more in for the same power
2) simpler cooling, which means you could fit it in smaller cases
Both of those are very good because you could fit both scenarios in to a production line trivially.
Larger procs go one way, smaller mobile ones the other way.
Hell, I am just surprised they are at 14nm. I never thought they could get down that low because of leakage.
Look at all the silicon used for crypto (Score:3, Interesting)
Take a look at this slide, on the right is the system on a chip version of their Broadwell 2 core processor:
http://hothardware.com/image_popup.aspx?image=big_idf-2013-8.jpg&articleid=27335&t=n
See how much of the chip is assigned to crypto functions? It's almost as big as one of the processor cores. All that silicon used for crypto and it's completely wasted because it cannot be trusted because of the NSA. It wouldn't surprise me if some of that silicon is NSA back door functionality because that's one heck of a lot of transistors to assign to crypto functions.
ARM vs x86 (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a good comparison of ARM vs x86 power efficiency at anandtech.com: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6536/arm-vs-x86-the-real-showdown [anandtech.com]
"At the end of the day, I'd say that Intel's chances for long term success in the tablet space are pretty good - at least architecturally. Intel still needs a Nexus, iPad or other similarly important design win, but it should have the right technology to get there by 2014."
(...)
"As far as smartphones go, the problem is a lot more complicated. Intel needs a good high-end baseband strategy which, as of late, the Infineon acquisition hasn't been able to produce. (...) As for the rest of the smartphone SoC, Intel is on the right track."
The future for CPUs is going to be focused on power consumption. The new Atom core is two times more powerful at the same power levels than the current Atom core. You can see http://www.anandtech.com/show/7314/intel-baytrail-preview-intel-atom-z3770-tested [anandtech.com]:
" Looking at our Android results, Intel appears to have delivered on that claim. Whether we’re talking about Cortex A15 in NVIDIA’s Shield or Qualcomm’s Krait 400, Silvermont is quicker. It seems safe to say that Intel will have the fastest CPU performance out of any Android tablet platform once Bay Trail ships later this year.
The power consumption, at least on the CPU side, also looks very good. From our SoC measurements it looks like Bay Trail’s power consumption under heavy CPU load ranges from 1W - 2.5W, putting it on par with other mobile SoCs that we’ve done power measurements on.
On the GPU side, Intel’s HD Graphics does reasonably well in its first showing in an ultra mobile SoC. Bay Trail appears to live in a weird world between the old Intel that didn’t care about graphics and the new Intel that has effectively become a GPU company. Intel’s HD graphics in Bay Trail appear to be similar in performance to the PowerVR SGX 554MP4 in the iPad 4. It’s a huge step forward compared to Clover Trail, but clearly not a leadership play, which is disappointing."