Intel Details Power Management Advancements in Haswell

MojoKid writes "Intel's next-generation CPU architecture, codenamed Haswell, puts heavy emphasis on reducing power consumption. Pushing Haswell down to a 10W TDP is an achievement, but hitting these targets requires collaboration. Haswell will offer finer-grained control over areas of logic that were previously either on or off, up to and including specific execution units. These optimizations are impressive, particularly the fact that idle CPU power is approaching tablet levels, but they're only part of the story. Operating system changes matter as well, and Intel has teamed up with Microsoft to ensure that Windows 8 takes advantage of current and future hardware. Haswell's 10W target will allow the chip to squeeze into many of the convertible laptop/tablet form factors on display at IDF, while Bay Trail, the 22nm, out-of-order successor to Clover Trail, arrives in 2013 as well. Not to mention the company's demonstration of the first integrated digital WiFi radio. Folks have been trading blows over whether Intel could compete with ARM's core power consumption. Meanwhile, Santa Clara has been busy designing many other aspects of the full system solution for low power consumption and saving a lot of wattage in the process." It's mildly amusing that Windows 8 is the first version to gain dynamic ticks, something Linux has had working since around 2007.

Power Consumption.

[bobwrit]

"Folks have been trading blows over whether Intel could compete with ARM's core power consumption. " For the mobile markets, Here's the best numbers I could find on the various processor's power output: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mobile/display/20110921142759_Nvidia_Unwraps_Performance_Benchmarks_of_Tegra_3_Kal_El.html [xbitlabs.com] The 10W Intel processor is still ~8x outside the power output of a Tegra 3 at 1GHz/Core, and ~6.662x the power output of a OMAP4 processor. While Intel is clearly working on getting down to the ~1W power range, they still have a ways to go. They may get there, but until I see silicon, I'm not holding my breath for it.

Re:Intel already realized where their market is

[Anonymous Coward]

If I've been keeping up properly, Intel has a pretty solid lead over ARM in pure performance/watt (look at how ARM clusters work out), but Intel has never been able to scale down well enough to compete with ARM in the 10W area.

Re:Windows is behind Linux

[Tough Love]

I was running Windows the other day and it's just amazing how much it resembles KDE. Of course it hasn't got quite the same fit and finish and a bunch of features are missing, but hey, give Microsoft a chance.

Re:Anti-MS sentiment at the end of TFS

[Guy Harris]

I think you will find the point is that Intel/Microsoft are int he middle of making big things about the power efficiency of Windows 8, whereas they are playing catchup in a lot of areas with Linux, for which Intel currently say they will not release the same information on Haswell that they have given Microsoft.

Explicitly, or is that an inference from various things Intel have publicly said and been claimed to say about Clover Trail and the Intel presentation talking about both Haswell and Clover Trail power-saving features? If so, note also that Intel have been claimed to say that "There is no fundamental barrier to supporting Linux on Clover Trail since it utilizes Intel architecture cores, we are simply focusing our current efforts for this Clover Trail product on Windows 8." [slashdot.org], so I'm a little loath to assume what the truth is at this point.

Dynamic ticks

[MtHuurne]

Linux has had the dynamic ticks (CONFIG_NO_HZ) feature for a while, but that only shuts down the timer tick when the system is completely idle. There is a new feature in the works named "adaptive tickless", see announcement [lkml.org] and a recent progress update [lwn.net], that will also shut down the timer tick when the system is running a single task.