Intel's New Chips, High Power And Low

sebFlyte writes "Centrino has been one of Intel's major successes of late, and they've just released the replacement, Sonoma. ZDNet has stripped the new chipset, and published a review of the new kit with all the technical details of what this new chipset will do for your laptop." ZeroOne42 adds a link to Hardware Zone's exhaustive look at Sonoma, "complete with benchmark results between a Sonoma notebook (Fujitsu E8020) and a Centrino one (Gigabyte N512). Looks like Sonoma is closing up the technological gap between desktops and notebooks." And on the desktop side, foxalopex writes "It seems that Intel's new dual-core CPU chips will have some of the highest wattage ratings ever seen on the X86 CPU market, which, according to Tom, wasn't what they initially said would happen. I guess this isn't too surprising seeing how AMD's been beating them on power usage in the last several revisions of chips."

Comments

130 watts...

[Lisandro]

...sheeze.

At least Intel appears to miss this goal. Documents released to system builders specify the Thermal design power (TDP) of Smithfield processors at 130 watts. This represents an increase of more than 13 percent over today's Pentium 4 5xx (Prescott) and the upcoming 6xx (2 MByte L2 Cache), which post 115 watts. Maximum supply current climbs from 119 ampere to 125 ampere. The new chips also consume more power than Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46 GHz processor (116.7 watts) and Intel's most demanding chip: The Itanium 2 1.6 GHz consumes 122 watts.

I'm baffled by these numbers - specially considering AMD offerings perform comparably while consuming less power. I know these are dual-core designs, but it's still awfully high.

I always found hard to find how much of that consumed power translates onto wasted power (heat dissipation), but in any case, i wouldn't want to be in a room with a couple of Sonoma servers.

Re:130 watts...

[ooze]

The funny thing is, ARM sees multicore as a chance to save power. Just see their marketing talk on their MP architechture. And if done right, it is actually a chance to save power.

And on Laptops...I still havent found any that are anything close to my needs. Could not anyone make a 10'' screen/overall (maybe even those new organic displays) with an ARM processor, 2GB flash(or even this in the line magnetic ram), a ethernet port and a few USB ports? And 15h+ battery life? Not even a hd is needed to get a nice Linux running there. And I could do all my development/office work on this.

Re:130 watts...

[TeknoHog]

Answer: 100%

From an energy perspective, the CPU only converts electricity into heat

Well, yes and no. There is, in fact, a thermodynamical minimum limit for how much heat is produced by information processing. Everything above this is waste due to inefficiencies.

This applies when information is destroyed, which is almost always the case. For instance, when you sum two 32-bit numbers (64 bits of info) into a new 32-bit one, you are effectively destroying 32 bits. Information destroyed is entropy created.

Entropy is directly related to heat, and the minimum amount of heat thus created is

kT * information in bits

where k = 1.38E-23 J/K (Boltzmann's constant) and T is the temperature. So for example, if we destroy 32 bits * 1 Ghz = 3.2E10 bits per second, in room temperature of 300 K, we have to create at least

1.32E-10 Watts

This is negligible compared to today's processors, but it might become important sometime in far future. (Note to those in the know, this is a rough order-of-magnitude calculation, but the basic principle remains.)

Reversible computing is a new paradigm that does not destroy information, so it can theoretically produce a lot less heat. It may not seem very useful to remove that 1E-10 W of heat, but dealing with the information loss probably has some wasteful effects. Think about the waste always being 1E12 times the theoretical value (constant efficiency of 0.0000000001 %); now reduce the theoretical value to zero and think of the outcome.

Re:Agreed in that use

[hackstraw]

Agreed if you're running a data center, or if you have a large business with hundreds of these things, I meant more for personal use.

I don't see where anybody would loose from a more efficient processor design.

The same goes with transportation. The more efficient the transportation, the cheaper it will be for goods and services that depend on them, which is about everything today. The same can be said about processor design.

One interesting thing, is I have _never_ seen a price increase or decrease for any goods or services due to the price of gasoline/diesel fuel which is pretty volatile compared to other commodities and inflation. Its kinda weird I think.

Re:Performance

[nikster]

rule of thumb for clock speeds: Pentium M x 1.5 = Pentium 4

e.g. a P-M with 2 GHz runs about as fast as a P4 3 GHz. AMD's QuantiSpeed ratings are usually on target for the P4.

according to german computer mag c't, the 2.13GHz Pentium-M achieves a SPEC CINT2000 of 1600, which is similar to a P4-3.8 GHz or an AMD Athlon64 4000+.

and it does that all with a thermal design power of 27 Watts (compared to the 100+ the P4/AMD need...). very neat.

Re:It depends what you're after

[baker_tony]

Where are your facts to support this? I am actually interested as to why AMD machines are unstable for games, I thought they where much better than Intel for that, and Intel is much better than AMD for video processing sorta tasks (due to long pipeline).

Sonoma Mini?

[parvenu74]

Now that the Mac mini is out, if Apple sells millions upon millions of units it should only be a matter of time until one of the PC makers will come out with a mimic of it (like, say, Asus who is making the Mac mini in the first place).

It seems to me that Sonoma would be an ideal chipset to cram all of the functionality into a pint-sized box as small as, or slightly larger than the Mac mini. If the box has about as clean of a look to it, did away with the PS2, serial, and parallel ports, was user serviceable, and had room for a standard 3.5 inch SATA drive, I think it would do really well -- even if it weren't clad in anodized aluminum. Ahh... perchance to dream!

damn right

[darkwhite]

See the little bars at the bottom, titled "Winchester 90nm" in the "power usage" link? I bought two of those recently. They run STONE COLD when idle and you can barely feel the warmth under load.

It's nice to know your CPU uses TEN TIMES LESS POWER when idle and at least three times less under load than an equivalently performing Intel, and is within 50% of the highest performance CPU on the market. AMD is going to beat Intel's desktop offerings silly with their new 90nm parts.