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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.
the OP was more likely talking about the low end of the scale as you noticed.
If all portable devices got the battery life of say an e-ink Kindle there wouldn't be a ARM domination at the low end. But as we've seen, you scale up the screen to full color and slightly larger along with more software to run apps then you start seeing how putting large enough batteries on the things has an effect on their "portability" capabilities.
We all know Microsoft has been in the tablet market for well over a decade, almost two, and they've failed constantly because the resulting products were huge, heavy and battery life was not so great. Here we see Microsoft trying it yet again and this time they are tuning the hardware to the OS to try and get something even close to the current ARM platforms while providing x86 compatibility. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with this time.
As for ARM, how crippled will the OS and its capabilities be to get a comparable usability as existing options( iOS or Android )? There's still alot of secrecy in this area as recently noted by Microsoft's secret SDK. They want you to think it's about extra features for a marketing surprise but come on, when was the last time Microsoft surprised anyone with new useful capabilities? Most likely it's to limit how immature the platform is and possibly how limited it has to be to operate in the realm of existing battery life expectations. We'll know pretty soon though.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Performance per watt isn't a single number that can be compared to tell the full story. In an envelope desired by small portable devices, ARM has a significant edge in performance per watt over Intel's Atom.
In server market, Intel has an edge, of course, as they have chips specifically designed for those kinds of high-power workloads. ARM is still a few years away from having anything designed for similar use.
Market share numbers in both categories reflect this.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Well, comparing Atom N570 based system vs some Cortex A9 SoC isn't really a fair comparison, is it? The Atom system has to power things like PCI busses, SATA-controllers etc.
How about redoing that comparison using Medfield (Atom based SoC) that still using an Atom CPU (the Bonnell core) that can hit 1.6GHz, but uses FAR less power when looking at the system as a whole.