

The x86 Power Myth Busted: In-Depth Clover Trail Power Analysis - sciwiz
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6529/busting-the-x86-power-myth-indepth-clover-trail-power-analysis

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Zenst
From the article: "We've demonstrated this in our battery life tests already.
Samsung's ATIV Smart PC uses an Atom Z2760 and features a 30Wh battery with an
11.6-inch 1366x768 display. Microsoft's Surface RT uses NVIDIA's Tegra 3
powered by a 31Wh battery with a 10.6-inch, 1366x768 display. In our 2013
wireless web browsing battery life test we showed Samsung with a 17% battery
life advantage, despite the 3% smaller battery. Our video playback battery
life test showed a smaller advantage of 3%." It is worth also noting that they
are comparing this years intel with last years ARM. Also worth noting that it
is also a smaller CPU process of around 25% in Intels favour.

Now nothing stopping Intel doing ARM chips down the line or indeed doing some
hybrid chip. They have many cards they can play if they don't get the sales
they want.

I would love the day when you could get a motherboard and the current Intel
and ARM chips are pin compatable so you could drop what you like in, wouldn't
that be a wonderful dream.

~~~
dietrichepp
I think the trend is definitely away from user-replaceable CPUs. Some
enthusiasts say it's "sad", but it's just part of a general trend towards
integration on a larger scale. You can't replace a broken transistor on your
Intel 4004 either.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's more a question of upgrades than trying to fix anything. CPUs are quite
reliable. The only important things to replace when they break are power
supplies, batteries, and storage drives.

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Symmetry
I don't think this is a particularly fair test of ARM and x86 as
architectures, though it is of Tegra 3 and Cloverview as specific systems.
Cloverview just came out, but Tegra 3 is nearly 2 years old. Cloverview is on
Intel's 32nm process node, whereas Tegra 3 is on TSMC's 40nm node (and
remember that Intel's 45nm node actually had better performance than TSMC's
40nm).

And I've never quite understood NVidia's design choices with Tegra 3. All the
other ARM SOC vendors used a low power version of the process node they were
on for their ARM cores, but NVidia used the standard process version for 4 of
their cores and the low power version only for the 5th core. And yet those
four cores are clocked only slightly faster than the cores of their
competitors, while their 5th core is clocked way lower.

Now, NVidia's GPUs are top notch and while it hasn't been that successful in
recent generations of phones I assume that NVidia's existing Windows software
compatibility is why it was selected for the Surface.

EDIT: I seem to remember that there were some big issues on the GPU front a
couple of years ago with NVidia's design tools and TSMC's 40nm process having
something of an impedance mismatch. The big improvements between NVidia's
GPU's from that time to their current generation attest to these issues being
sorted out.

~~~
justincormack
Tegra3 has been a huge failure, and ended up with very few design wins.
Imagine that surface got a good deal.

~~~
zanny
It got Nvidia in the best selling tablet of the year, the Nexus 7. Technical
merits aside, it was a win for Nvidia's bottom line.

I still don't get how embedded chipset manufacturers can keep competing with
the largest graphics company in the world in the gpu space so easily though.
Tegra 4 is _supposed_ to be jumping from 12 up to 72 in the highest end model
Kepler cores instead of old 8000 cores. If they manage to get some super
efficient high performance graphics in mobile I could see a games revolution
around it.

Especially if they put that in the Nexus7#2 next year.

~~~
Symmetry
_"I still don't get how embedded chipset manufacturers can keep competing with
the largest graphics company in the world in the gpu space so easily though."_

Just for some perspective:

Samsung total revenue: $247 Billion Apple total revenue: $157 Billion Qualcomm
total revenue: $19.1 Billion Texas Instruments total revenue: $13.7 Billion
NVidia total revenue: $4.00 billion

NVidia is the relatively small fish in the pond here, and if they have
relatively more graphics experience the others have relatively more experience
with everything else in this space.

------
majormajor
Does Windows RT offer anything other than ARM compatibility for better
size/battery life? Is the whole confusing Windows RT / Windows 8 split
something that could've been avoided if MS had known Intel would have these
chips ready?

~~~
tmurray
I think it's a political move more than a technical one. WinRT lets MS say to
Intel that Intel has to care about the tablet market and low-power processors
or otherwise ARM will get a foothold in Windows (giving them easy access to
the low-end of the laptop market in the next few years).

Of course, this would have worked a lot better if people cared about WinRT at
all, but I'm sure that was the idea.

~~~
antrix
> WinRT lets MS say to Intel that Intel has to care about the tablet market
> and low-power processors

I don't think Intel needs MS to say that. The lost money on the table in the
smartphone-tablet ecosystem is enough incentive!

~~~
kyrra
Margins on CPUs for tablets and phones are not all that high. Intel enjoys
pretty amazing margins on their desktop market, so they aren't missing too
much there. They just need to keep ARM away from their bread and butter of
profits, which probably can be explained by their current push to keep ARM
out.

~~~
vidarh
No, but tablets and smartphones are starting to affect the PC market. Desktops
are dying, and laptops are stagnating.

For a lot of people, a smartphone or tablet is sufficient to meet their
computing needs. Especially with ability to connect a TV and keyboard, and a
number of small ARM based "mini PCs" starting to arrive.

------
kenjackson
Intel would be wise to brand Clovertrail as something other than Atom (or
Celeron). Clovertrail perf and efficiency are very good and the Atom name
typically suggest otherwise.

If I could get a Surface Pro with a Haswell at the listed Surface Pro prices,
it would be a no brainer. But with a 3rd-gen Core i5 -- not so enticing.

------
maximilianburke
I just found that Intel is about to release a server-version of the Atom,
codenamed Centerton, based on a 32nm process. These will be 64-bit processors
and support Intel's virtualization extensions.

Next year there will be a 22nm version of Centerton, Avoton, with a 14nm
processor following the year after. Centerton, and possibly Avoton, will be
out before the first 64-bit ARM chips.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/6509/intel-launches-
centerton-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6509/intel-launches-centerton-
atom-s1200-family-first-atom-for-servers)

It looks like Intel is taking the Atom's intended market serious enough to
extend their tick-tock cadence to it.

~~~
Zenst
This is on area which Intel are trying to cover low power server market to
stop people looking and playing with ARM's as much as possible.

Eitherway it certainly will wake up Intel, took AMD with the XP series chips
to get Intel into gear many years ago and they need another kick for momentum.

But on a like for like generation of CPU and nanometer size ARM certianly have
more headroom. Intel though certainly have a crazy no lose situation as they
have a full ARM liscence so can always make and sell ARM chips.

Intel also have there multi core knights corner CPU's and they will only get
better and have many area's of research into feilds that have yet to emerge. I
find there whols onchip radio research very tantalising for future chip to
chip communicatons with regards to production costs of servers.

Fun times, and as a consumer I'm happier we now have a race on our hands.

------
dfc
Does anyone know anymore about this and or can explain what the relation is
between frame rates and survey data?

 _"User experience (quantified through high speed cameras mapping frame rates
to user survey data)"_

~~~
wpietri
My interpretation was that they would use cameras to measure frame rates and
then look for the level at which lower frame rates reduced user happiness as
measured through surveys. Pushing frame rates beyond that would be much less
valuable.

------
fulafel
They say they proved the atom performance advantage, but the linked article
says they had nothing but a JavaScript test which probably has significant
code quality differences between the Intel and Arm JITs.

------
mtgx
The problem is Intel has already lost on the performance side. Intel has
always needed 3 things to beat ARM, and they need all 3 to be competitive:
performance, energy efficiency, price.

With Atom, they've _always_ had the performance advantage. In fact they've had
a big advantage over ARM at the time when when Atom came out. It was like
several times more powerful than the ARM chip inside iPhone 3G.

But to be competitive, Intel needed to compete on the other 2 levels, as well.
So they kept Atom's performance mostly the same, while they tried over the
years to push Atom down from a 10W TDP. But while Intel tried to lower the
power consumption, ARM's chips were gaining in performance - faster than
Intel. So now when Intel has finally reached parity with ARM in energy
efficiency, ARM has surpassed it in performance with Cortex A15, and from what
I've seen so far, by a lot.

Then there's also the pricing issue. I think they've improved there quite a
bit. An Atom chip used to be close to $100. Now it's probably more like
$40-$50 (this dual core version). But that's still like at least 50% more than
an ARM chip.

So Intel still has a lot of catching up to do in "overall competitiveness",
because right now it looks like they've only switched the much bigger
performance leadership for "energy efficiency parity", and are losing at the
other two. I'd like to see how high they are willing to go with Atom on
performance, until they realize that it's going to cannibalize their Core i3
market.

~~~
InclinedPlane
This is a faulty analysis, I think. The Atom wasn't originally directly in
competition with ARM, they were in different market segments. And it wasn't a
case of the atom merely being iterated in design until it matched ARM
efficiency levels, that's not what's happened. Instead, the Atom was
originally just a low-power stand-alone processor and now Intel has developed
a first generation Atom based system-on-a-chip. The fact that Intel's first
SoC designs are so closely competitive to ARM's n-th generation designs should
send alarm bells ringing throughout the ARM industry. Intel is good at
improving design and they are even better at economies of scale.

It's easy to dismiss Intel's offerings as not being competitive with state-of-
the-art ARM designs, but only a sucker would dismiss Intel and rest on their
laurels. Intel's 2nd and 3rd generation chips are just going to be that much
better, and ARM could be in serious trouble in as little as a year or two from
now. Imagine, for example, an Intel based android powered tablet that can run
stock Windows in a VM or emulate windows and can run most windows applications
and perhaps even games, while also being able to run all android applications.
And do so at a cost/performance/efficiency level equivalent to any ARM based
system. That's the sort of thing that should send shivers down the back of
Samsung or even Apple.

~~~
vidarh
ARM CPU's outsold Intel CPU's in volume well before tablets and smartphones
started using them.

If I remember correctly, projected volume of ARM CPU's for this year is in the
region of 3 _billion_ units.

The smartphone and tablet market is not even near being the majority of ARM
CPU sales. So I don't think ARM will despair over Intel's designs just yet.

~~~
Joeri
Volume is not profit. Intel is an order of magnitude more profitable. However,
ARM's model seems to be to suck the profit out of the market. It's a textbook
example of a paradigm shift, with an initially inferior product offered at a
much lower price point gradually catching up with the market leader. Intel has
no choice but to follow ARM down the price curve to settle at a lower profit
margin. They seem to have realized this with their current chip strategy. I
would be looking at intel to start diversifying into the device market,
because that's where the profit is moving.

------
pretoriusB
That's some bad copy write from the start:

> _The untold story of Intel's desktop (and notebook) CPU dominance after 2006
> has nothing to do with novel new approaches to chip design or spending
> billions on keeping its army of fabs up to date. While both of those are
> critical components to the formula_

If those components are "critical to the formula" then you cannot say that "it
has nothing to do" with them.

Critical means: it has absolutely something to do with them too.

