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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.
Contrary to other markets the mobile devices market is basically computer architecture agnostic. Since Intel cannot or do not want to manufacture CPUs cheaper than ARM licensees plus they still have lousy performance/watt their only remaining market is something which takes advantage of the vast catalog of pre-existing software for the x86 architecture namely Windows. I have little doubts Intel will eventually succeed to build a cheaper x86 CPU with better performance/watt than ARM given their manufacturing prowess and increasingly high amounts of integration they are providing. But it may take another processor generation or two.
"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 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.
-- (this is a sig) My Computer Programming Forumhttp://www.programers.co.nr/
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.
Smells a lot of Intel teaming up with Microsoft specifically against ARM (which has very good Linux support..), and I am guessing means Windows on Arm is going to get pretty damn poor support.
The obvious (possible) trade here is Intel gives Msoft the advantage on Haswell in return for MSoft not taking their Win8 ARM 'commitment' quite as seriously as some thought they would.
Time will tell.
Look at the pie charts on this page: http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intels-Game-Changer-One-Size-Fits-All-Haswell/?page=4
Notice how the display is quickly dominating the power consumption? The whole ARM vs. x86 power consumption bit is bunk. Intel has proven it can be competitive with ARM, and even if ARM could magically make a chip that uses zero power, your display isn't going to suck down any less juice based on the instruction set of the processor running your device....
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
It's mildly amusing that Windows 8 is the first version to gain dynamic ticks, something Linux has had working since around 2007.
Its also mildly amusing that Windows has always trumped Linux in battery life, despite not implementing this power saving feature.
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.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
That Linux just recently got and find that "mildly amusing".
It is rather silly. Yes, OSes have different feature sets. They don't all implement everything at the same time.
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.", so I'm a little loath to assume what the truth is at this point.
>>>Lol, behind Linux? Right. Who gets better battery life? I shouldn't even argue, your desperate desire to "beat" Microsoft seems to be all you cling on to
I will never comprehend people who look at Micrsoft and believe it's a good OS. Maybe they are Xbox fanboys and that love is spilling-over to all the MS? It's a workable OS but certainly not the best. It was hard-to-use when it was invented in the 80s, crashprone in the 90s, buggy in the first decade of 2000s, and even now still has major flaws (mostly with security holes and illogical behaviors that confuse users... like claiming "there's no USB drive" just because the drive went into a low-power energy-saving state).
You'd think after 27 years of development they'd finally eliminate the flaws & make it near-perfect like Apple did with OS X. But no. ALSO: I was merely responding to this part of the /. article: "It's mildly amusing that Windows 8 is the first version to gain dynamic ticks, something Linux has had working since around 2007." I'm not sure how you missed that sentence.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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 and a recent progress update, that will also shut down the timer tick when the system is running a single task.
The freature was add to Linux kernel in 2.6.21 http://lwn.net/Articles/223185/