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Intel Medfield SoC Specs Leak
MrSeb writes "Specifications and benchmarks of Intel's 32nm Medfield platform — Chipzilla's latest iteration of Atom and first real system-on-a-chip oriented for smartphones and tablets — have leaked. The tablet reference platform is reported to be a 1.6GHz x86 CPU coupled with 1GB of DDR2 RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM radios, and an as-yet-unknown GPU. The smartphone version will probably be clocked a bit slower, but otherwise the same. Benchmark-wise, Medfield seems to beat the ARM competition from Samsung, Qualcomm, and Nvidia — and, perhaps most importantly, it's also in line with ARM power consumption, with an idle TDP of around 2 watts and load around 3W."
Awesome, with smartphones these days containing 6 watt-hour batteries you'll get 3 hours standby time! Thats nearly as much an an iPhone 4S
It beats the current crop of dual core ARM processors (Exynos, snapdragon s3 and Tegra 2) in one benchmark that "leaked".
Nothing fishy about that at all.
Quote Vrzone:
Intel Medfield 1.6GHz currently scores around 10,500 in Caffeinemark 3. For comparison, NVIDIA Tegra 2 scores around 7500, while Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8260 scores 8000. Samsung Exynos is the current king of the crop, scoring 8500. True - we're waiting for the first Tegra 3 results to come through.
But the same paragraph says
Benchmark data is useless in the absence of real-world, hands-on testing,
If the performance figures are realistic this is one fast processor, and it appears to be a single core chip, (or at least I saw nothing to the contrary). That's impressive.
Single cores can get busy handling games or complex screen movements, leading to a laggy UI. If they put a good strong GPU on this thing you might never see any lag.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
come on, when talking about comparing embedded SoC's is it really fair to say a new die shrunk version of another architecture best another using a much larger die size?
So here we have Intel putting their low cost product on their high cost process and claiming a victory? I don't buy it but since Intel is going to be selling these things at deep discounts, I might buy a product or two. I don't think in the long run they can continue this game but it's fun to see them attempting it.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
teh37737one's point, if i may, was that this 'leak' was actually a 'plant', a PR move by Intel to get people posting ridiculous speculative nonsense, like, exactly the stuff you posted in your comment.
"if this is realistic, intel has an awesome CPU" etc etc etc.
Does anyone care if its realistic? Intel sure doesn't, it just wants people to speculate that it might be realistic, and then talk about Intel, and how awesome Intel is.
But of course, it might be a load of crap... when the actual numbers come out, who knows what they will say? And when real programs hit the thing, who knows what it will do?
That's why Intel is 'leaking' it. On purpose. So they can have 'plausible deniability'. They can churn the rumor mill, get their product mentioned in the 24 hour ADHD cycle of tech news, get people posting on slashdot, etc, but Intel itself never has to sully it's good name by engaging in outright pushing of vapor-ware.
If only the guys at Duke Nukem had been smart enough to 'leak' stuff 'anonymously' to the press, instead of giving out press releases...
Of course, another way to look at it is this: It's yet another example of the corporate philosophical suite that is drowning our civilization in garbage and awful values. Never say anything directly, never take responsibility for your words or actions, never be straight with people, and hide everything you are doing in layers and layers of techno jargon, babble, and nonsense.
It looks like CaffeineMark 3 is single threaded. At least the online version is anyway.
How can you compare a 1.6ghz presumably single core against dual core cpus on a single thread benchmark?
I just compared my laptop which is 2.2ghz dual core with my desktop, 3ghz single core. laptop gets 16,000, desktop gets 24,000. Laptop was at 50% cpu, desktop was at 100%.
These days 32nm is their main process. They use 45nm still but not for a ton of stuff. Almost all their chips have moved to it. Heck they have 22nm online now and chips will be coming out rather soon for it (full retail availability in April).
Once of Intel's advantages is that they invest massive R&D in fabrication and thus are usually a node ahead of everyone else. They don't outsource fabbing the chips and they pour billions in to keeping on top of new fabrication tech.
So while 32nm is new to many places (or in some cases 28nm, places like TSMC skipped the 32nm node and instead did the 28nm half node) Intel has been doing 32nm for almost 2 years now (first commercial chips were out in January 2010).
Yeah... no.
vr-zone
As it stands right now, the prototype version is consuming 2.6W in idle with the target being 2W, while the worst case scenarios are video playback: watching the video at 720p in Adobe Flash format will consume 3.6W, while the target for shipping parts should be 1W less (2.6W)
extremeTech
The final chips, which ship early next year, aim to cut this down to 2W and 2.6W respectively. This is in-line with the latest ARM chips, though again, we’ll need to get our hands on some production silicon to see how Medfield really performs.
I did read the story - but did you? Its idle TDP stands at 2.6W. A 1700mAH battery (typical in a cell phone) @ 3.6V = 6.12 Volt-Amps (i.e. Watts). So, you'll get around 2.5 hrs of uptime under idle conditions, assuming the battery is new. Good luck trying to charge that monster ever 2 hrs!
Who cares about performance when your phone will be dead before making a single call? Not much better in tablets either!
So, what is this chip competing against? Other laptop chips from Intel?
Yeah... no.
vr-zone
As it stands right now, the prototype version is consuming 2.6W in idle with the target being 2W, while the worst case scenarios are video playback: watching the video at 720p in Adobe Flash format will consume 3.6W, while the target for shipping parts should be 1W less (2.6W)
extremeTech
The final chips, which ship early next year, aim to cut this down to 2W and 2.6W respectively. This is in-line with the latest ARM chips, though again, we’ll need to get our hands on some production silicon to see how Medfield really performs.
And which ARM SoC's idle at 2W? That's at least an order of magnitude greater than any ARM SoC - those typically idle at a few tens or hundreds of milliAmps. ARM's big.LITTLE architectures will bring that down even further.
So, Medfield may be competitive on speed and TDP at full load, but if you are a mobile device maker, would you care? You would probably be more interested in eking out more uptime from your tiny battery.
It's bloated. It had its time. I LOVED writing in assembly on my 80286, the rich instruction set made quick work of even the most complex of paddle ball games...
However, that was when I was still a child. Now I'm grown, it's time to put away childish things. It's time to actually be platform independent and cross platform, like all of my C software is. It's time to get even better performance and power consumption with a leaner or newer instruction set while shrinking the die.
Please, just let all those legacy instruction's microcode go. You can't write truly cross platform code in assembly. It's time to INNOVATE AGAIN. Perhaps create an instruction set that lets you get more out of your MFG process; Maybe one that's cross platform (like ARM is). Let software emulation provide legacy support. Let's get software vendors used to releasing source code, or compiling for multiple architectures and platforms. Let's look at THAT problem and solve it with perhaps a new type of linker that turns object code into the proper machine code for the system during installation (sort of like how Android does). DO ANYTHING other than the same old: Same Inefficient Design made more efficient via shrinking.
Intel, it's time to let x86 go.
According to what I could dig up (memory, and corroboration here), snapdragons use about 500mw at idle. Thats one quarter to one sixth the power consumption of intel's offering.
Doing some research, it looks like Tegra3s use about .5w per core as well. Again, Intel is pretty far back if theyre throwing out a single core and hitting 2-3 watts.
UI lag is almost exclusively limited to fill-rate on mobile devices. This is a problem on Android, since it is hard for them to optimize it for all of the various chipsets. If the GPU cannot quickly fill pixels, more of the preparation of a frame has to be offloaded to the CPU. For modern GUIs, each pixel can be touched several times, so without a good fill rate, more heavy lifting is required from the CPU. Multiple cores can help, since more processing power can be dedicated to quickly updating the UI.
Intel took x86 to workstations and supercomputers killing many RISC processors in the process. It'll be fun to see them pull it off again against ARM.
No, it wouldn't. RISC is a superior instruction set. x86 only beat RISC because it was really the only game in town if you want to run Windows, which every non-mac user did. At the time, the desktop was king and made Intel lots and lots of money, which they used to beef up their server offerings. Now we are stuck with x86 with RISC being used only in "closed" architectures like smart phones, consoles and big-iron servers.
I like competition. I'd rather see ARM make gobs of money of designing chips that everyone can improve on than Intel make gobs and more gobs of money selling desktop, server and mobile chips that only they may design, produce and sell.
The final processor line that Intel makes will be the one they are producing when they become the only game in town.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Bingo. My ageing Nokia, while lacking in horsepower, has excellent battery life... It has a 600MHz ARM, and a 3.2Wh battery. It manages to idle for a week at least, I'm sure it's hit 10 days before, but lets say 7, to be safe.
3.2W / 7 / 24 = 20mW idle. Two fucking orders of magnitude better than their *target*. (not to mention this includes the entire phone, not just the core, in real life).
I presume the more powerful android rigs still keep it within 100mW for the whole phone, idling. - That would give you roughly two days idle on a decent sized phone battery (5Wh). That's still more than an order of magnitude difference.
Sent from my PDP-11
Bloodthirsty bastard, aren't you? Killing off the competition is fun?
I haven't liked Intel very much since I read the first story of unethical business practices. Intel doesn't rank as highly on my shitlist as Microsoft, but they are on it.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
RISC isn't an instruction set - it's a design strategy.
RISC = reduced instruction set computing
CISC = complex instruction set computing
The idea of RISC (have a small highly regular/orthogal instruction set) goes back to the early days of computing when chip design and compiler design wasn't what it is today. The idea was that a small simple instruction would correspond to a simpler chip design that could be clocked faster than a CISC design while at the same time being easier to compile optimized code.
Nowadays advances in chip design and compiler code generation/optimization have essentially undone these benefits of RISC, but the remaining benefits are that RISC chips have small die sizes hence low power requirements, high production yields and low cost, and these are the real reasons ARM is so successful, not the fact that the instruction set is "better".
What RISC platform did XP, Vista and Windows 7 run on? XP had support for Itanium, but that's not a RISC platform. Vista and Win7 only support 32- and 64-bit x86. So.. It seems you are wrong in your statement.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
> RISC is a superior instruction set. x86 only beat RISC because it was really the only game in town if you want to run Windows
Modern ARM processors aren't pure RISC processors. Most ARM code is written in Thumb-2, which is a variable length instruction code just like x86. Back in the 90s when transistor budgets were tiny, RISC was a win. When you only have a hundred thousand gates to play with, you're best off spending them on a simple pipelined execution unit. The downsides of RISC has always been the increased size of the program code and reduced freedom to access data efficiently (ie with unaligned accesses, byte addressing and powerful address offset instructions). With modern transistor budgets it is worth spending some gates to make the processor understand a compact and powerful instruction set. That way you save more gates in the rest of the computer than you spend doing this (ie in the caches, databuses and RAMs).
As a result of all this, in some ways, ARM chips are evolving to look more and more like an Intel x86 design. I'm still a big fan of ARM though. Intel will have a long way to go to compete on price, even if they can compete on power.
My mistake-- those numbers are at full load, not idle. That certainly doesnt help intel at all.