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Intel Challenges ARM On Power Consumption... And Ties
GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware just published a detailed look at the Intel Atom Z2760 in the Acer Iconia W510 and compared it to the NVIDIA Tegra 3 in the Microsoft Surface. They break it down and demonstrate how the full Windows 8 tablet outperforms the Windows RT machine in power consumption. They break down power consumption to include the role of the CPU, GPU, memory controller and display. Anandtech is also reporting similar findings, but only reports CPU and GPU utilization."
Despite repeated claims that x86 is beating ARM here, they look neck and neck. Assuming you can make a meaningful comparison.
What about floating point checks and comparisons?
Despite repeated claims that x86 is beating ARM here, they look neck in neck.
It's neck and neck.
It's "neck and neck" as in a pair of horses very close together at the finish line.
Sigh
Oh for crying out loud: Neck and Neck.
Often used when describing two racers that are nearly even in position.
No brain, no pain.
If two processors are Neck and Neck in power consumption and one of them is x86. It means x86 is ahead. It's got better clock speeds and it's got more software going for it than arm. Yes we have a lot of android apps, but I would rather have my windows applications to those "apps" and their private internet. Unless Neck and Neck is for a processor intel does not produce any more, it's clearly advantage intel.
Even if true (watch out for cognitive dissonsoance with respect to Intel power efficiency claims) it does not mean a thing if Intel cannot match the price. Currently something like $1 goes to ARM holdings per chip. Lets see a bloated old monopolist get by on that.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
In terms of processing power per watt, the Snapdraon S4 kills both of them handily.
Tegra 3 is ancient already, and Atom has never been a performer in any platform.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-arm-processor-soc-atom,17476.html When that story was posted i said that all ARM was doing was poking the bear. Didn't take long for Intel to get there either. Just shows you don't piss off a company with a lot of $ for R&D
I dont give a flying crap how much juice it sucks just give me 75 gigahertz CPU and a damn drive that can keep up.
Oh and make it AMD prices not intel.
for this test. They chosen Nvidia just so they had a fair play. Nvidia is not the best on the market regarding power consumption.
I want to see how it compares to PowerVR SGX, present on most ARM SoCs, including Apple, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Freescale, etc.
Actually, I would love to see how does it compare to Qualcomm Snapdragon. People can imagine the results. This wouldn't be fair too.
First, those articles are very interesting, thanks to Intel for making them happen.
Second, it's a good thing that Intel is catching up. I'm not a great Intel fan (rooting for the underdogs and all that), but still, I'm impressed.
Third, isn't the OS choice biasing the results a bit ? Would ARM fare better under a more ARM-oriented OS such as Android ? Or is power consumption profile, in the end, fully OS-independent ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
The only issue here is that this is not an apples for apples comparison. 40nm vs. 32nm should give a huge benefit to the 32nm Atom. We need to compare the same technology node for this to make any sense. Also, looking at the idle cpu power consumption from the anandtech article, the Atom SOC used 10x more power. /half speed or with the SOC sitting idle?
So the real question is what do most tablets spend the majority of their time doing? Running a benchmark at full
Example numbers: ARM CPU 0.0038 W vs.. Atom 0.02.
NVidia GPU 0.21 W vs. Imagination 0.11 W
The part that wins isn't from Intel, and it is available for ARM and it probably is the part that would lose badly in any benchmark.
Yay for biased benchmarking.
So far Intel wins by undersizing the GPU.
I have said it before: with ARM, you can choose from multiple, competing chip vendors, or you can license the ARM technology yourself and make your own chips if you are big enough; with x86, you would be chaining yourself to Intel and hoping they treat you well. So, if low-power x86 is neck and neck with ARM, that's not good enough.
Intel is used to high margins on CPUs, much higher than ARM chip makers collect. Intel won't want to give up on collecting those high margins. If Intel can get the market hooked on their chips, they will then ratchet up the margins just as high as they think they can.
The companies making mobile products know this, and will not lightly tie themselves to Intel. So long as ARM is viable, Intel is fighting an uphill battle.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Interesting that they are not comparing to a *modern* ARM chip (Cortex-A15), like the Exynos 5 (5250) or even a Qualcom Krait S4 (perhaps MSM8960).
So the news is that Intel has mostly caught up to an old ARM based chip based on designs/specs years older still and only running under MS-Windows. Yawn....
Windows RT still runs a Windows subsystem.
Android's apps are really fragments of apps, the gui is a different fragment from the service (the thing that does any grunt work if needed) etc. If you don't use a gui bit, then that gui bit never loads. If a service bit is running, it's gui bit can/usually is closed.
The broadcast intents mean apps that appear to be running, actually aren't always running or even in memory. The broadcast intent fires (e.g. a minute timer, particular network events, lots of other events...), wakes up the bit of code to handle it, executes, then returns, ending the fragment if necessary.
Apps can be killed at any time, and are designed that way. Hence code is already written to handle it.
Widgets on Android aren't anything, just bitmaps, if the widget changes, it can be because an intent fired, the tiny bit of code needed to redraw the fragment was loaded, executed then discarded. They're not code constantly running.
Apps are memory constrained on Android, on Windows they can grow beyond ram. Which unfortunately means paging to disk or flash. You can see why Android keeps the memory usage of apps down to a minimum given this limit, but paging is no longer a fix if flash is there, writing to flash eats battery.
There's lots of others things going on, but I've developed for both and there's simply no way a Windows app is going to ever achieve that, which presumably is why they're pushing Metro (I have no experience of metro to know if it fixes this).
The Intel vs Arm test is also void, because ARM's big thing is its low power idle. In Android that is most of the time, since it doesn't run much. So when they're running Windows / Windows RT, they're really comparing the power draw with the processors chugging along. So just because they are comparable on Windows, doesn't mean they would be on Android or iOS.
I thought when the MS Office people said they'd turned off the flashing cursor it was some sort of ironic joke, indicating how little effort they'd put into the RT port, as if they were proud of sinking RT! Really guys? You turned off the flashing cursor??? Android unloads my complete app and loads in only minimal bits of it when the front task is soaking up the processing power, and you turned off the blink??
The main problem is likely the compiler.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Arm draws 10% of the power of Atom at idle, and Android runs mostly at idle even when you're using it to do stuff because its designed from day one that way. Windows uses a lot more processing power, and 'idle' on those Windows, literally means not using it at all, and even when you're not using it, the Atom is still drawing > 1W.
so bad i bought a new pc with windows 7
early so i could avoid the bullshit windows 8 thats creeping around and if this route is the way ms is going glad steam is going linux cause this was the last pc i will get windows on it.
ill build form parts to avoid the boot lock bullshit
that crap ought to be illegal
and ill add by time this win 7 really is useless linux and steam ought to be very ready by then and ill just drop a linux on it.
nvidia and ati better be getting smart aobut this move cause i know a lot a hard core gamers that are now trying to get into linux now cause they really don't like wincrud 8
would probably be a much better comparison.
Why are they a node ahead all the time? Because they spend billions in R&D. When the downturn hit everyone in the fab business cut R&D, except Intel. So now they have a 22nm fab that has been running for awhile, another that just came fully online, and two 14nm fabs that'll be done soon (one on 450mm wafers).
They do precisely what geeks harp on companies to do: Invest money in R&D, invest in tech. They also don't outsource production, they own their own fabs and make their own chips. Most of them are even in the United States (8 of the 11).
The payoff is that they are ahead of people in terms of node size, and that their yields tend to be good (because the designers and fab people can work closely).
If other companies don't like it, well the only option is to throw in heavy on the R&D front. In ARM's case being not only fabless but actually chipless, just licensing cores to other companies, they can't do that. They are at the mercy of Samsung, TSMC, Global Foundries, and so on.
...too bad both run Windows 8.
Meh.
One area in which Intel is significantly more open than any manufacturer in the ARM ecosystem is in graphics hardware. Although Intel hasn't opened all their GPUs fully yet (from what I've read), this seems to be mostly because providing all the documentation takes time, not because they are against making everything open.
This contrasts dramatically with every single ARM license in existence. ARM's own MALI GPU is tightly closed (probably because MALI was a licensed technology) so the Lima team is having to reverse engineer a Linux driver. All the ARM licensees who provide GPUs seem to be either unable to open their GPU information because their GPU core has been licensed from a 3rd party, or else are simply disinterested in doing so, or else vehemently opposed to it for alleged commercial reasons in at least a couple of cases. So, the prospect of open documentation on SoC GPUs appearing from ARM manufacturers is vanishingly small.
This gives Intel at least one possible opening through which they can be fairly certain that the competition will not follow. Although that may be worth a lot to us in this community, the commercial payback from community support tends to be very slow in coming. Still, it's something that Intel might consider an advantage worth seizing in the mobile race where they're a rank outsider.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
One thing to keep in mind is that the ARM is much more general purpose while the Intel chips tend to have a more complex assembly instruction set. So for adding one number to another (x=y+z) I suspect the simpler ARM architecture is going to win on power consumption. But many Intel chips have assembly instructions specifically for crazy things like AES encryption. This is used as the basis of many encryption protocols, hashing, and random number generation. So if a machine is basically serving up all encrypted data then it is possible that an Intel chip will be much faster and consume much less power while performing these operations. Depending on whether he software will take advantage
So I thing this is a case where you really have to look at the significantly broken down performance results to see if your use case fits one chip better than the other. A normal consumer example would be if your OS is encrypting your file system and using these cool Intel instructions. I suspect that it would then be a night and day difference in battery drain. But the drag is that you probably have to pretty well buy a device with both chips, set up your standard configuration, and then test it out. This is generally only something an IT person about to provision a department might be expected to do.
I guess that the overall benchmark is all we really have to go by which really doesn't tell the whole story.
I dont give a flying crap how much juice it sucks just give me 75 gigahertz CPU and a damn drive that can keep up.
Oh and make it AMD prices not intel.
I suspect you're in the minority here (as in wanting power regardless of power consumption). For me, desktop (and laptop) processors became fast enough about 5 years ago. Probably more. The laptop i'm using now is about 5 years old and any performance problems it has aren't CPU related. A hard drive that can keep up with my 1.8Ghz CPU would be nice - something that could keep your proposed 75GHz running without waiting would be just a little awesome :)
All of that money for the x86, if it was thrown in for ARM we'd have something better than what we have now.
Battery life is not the reason we don't want Windows tablets. Windows tablets suck. Might as well evaluate which one makes a better skateboard.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Most Internet 'Tech' sites are 'pay for play'. Tom's, Anandtech, and Xbitlabs have some of the very worst reputations for this. AMD has never been rich enough to 'pay' in the first instance. Intel, on the other hand, has a PR budget that runs to billions EVER year.
Samsung's Exynos A15 ARM SoC parts blow away any Atom that Intel has ever built (benchmarks are easily found). To beat the A15, Intel has to use its crown-jewels, the ULV sandybridge parts. With its most recent core design, Intel has a significant lead, dual core vs A15 dual-core, BUT the ARM SoC parts are about to go quad core A15 for far less than anything Intel can afford to charge for a ULV dual core. At quad core, ARM will whip even Intel's latest cores at dual.
It is going to get far far worse for Intel. The ARM core that replaces the A15 in a year's time is fully 64-bit, but at only 60% of the die size of the A15 (yes, you read that right). ARM has massively re-engineered its core, even as it gets much more functionality.
Intel has essential written the articles for Anandtech and Tom's (they gave both sites guidelines defined to the nth degree). Tegra 3 is a joke part compared to the current leading ARM SoC designs from Samsung, Apple and Qualcomm, which is why Intel has chosen it for its comparison. Tegra 4, on the other hand, will blow the wheels of anything Intel can deliver in the next 3 years for the equivalent market.
There are rumours that Intel is about to merge with Nvidia (owners of Tegra). If the Tegra 4 lives up to its expectations AND sees a major GPU advantage over ARM and PowerVR GPU designs, the merger will be a lock. Intel cannot compete with ARM no matter what they do. The Intel TAX makes this impossible. Intel needs an insane Average-Selling-Price for its parts to maintain its mega-expensive operations. Intel is currently heavily subsidising some of its ULV parts to get them into ARM competing products (see the latest Chromebook as an example). It simply cannot afford to do this for significant numbers of chip sales.
ARM parts can come through as cost-plus. Intel parts can only sell at cost-plus-an unthinkably-high-overhead-profit. The Intel tax means:
- that die area is wasted on circuits translating x86 to internal RISC machine
- the translation units waste power
- the translation units carry a high IP cost that inflates the cost of the chip
- programming the chip is inefficient, as code must be written in x86, even though the actual core uses a completely different ISA internally.
Again, Tegra 3 is a poor example of a A9 ARM design (only one slow memory channel, for instance). ARM is already TWO generations beyond the A9 design, and each of these generations is a massive leap over the last. Is it any wonder Intel wants to be compared to the Tegra 3? And even then, Intel is lucky to get a draw.
You must mean RAM chips and even those are often on-chip on these SoC systems. The main thing here is price point and since Intel is the only manufacturer and uses a very expensive fab at 32nm, their system is far more expensive to buy than a "generic" 40nm fab Arm chip. You are right that the Intel is, under the hood, just as RISC as the Arm chip is. The point seems to be that with using a more expensive smaller fab, Intel can sort-of offset the extra power required for the on-the-fly translation of x86 instructions to the "native" instructions for the RISC cores in their system.
Even though that may be the case, indications that a lot of power was used by the Tegra SoC that has a reputation of being a power hungry beast that's at least one generation older as current state-of-the-art offerings in the last generation of smartphones and tablets. I welcome having x86 stuff available that is easy on batteries, since that would benefit the life cycle of "classic" laptops in the future. However, winning from Arm on the smartphone and tablet market, I don't see that happening any time soon. The other way around, Arm getting into desktop and server market, yes, that is very feasible. They are already getting into the gaming market as well, with several Android based consoles starting to appear in the last few months. Exiting developments and good for competition and prices.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I am currently working for ARM in Cambridge. This has been a major talking point at lunch. What happens when Intel really become serious in ARM's domain? The war isn't over, but ARM have to get serious about Intel. Who will buy ARM and invest some much needed capital?
They are comparing old ARM vs new Intel !
Computers are not fast enough yet for me. When I click on "rebuild all" it doesn't complete within 5 seconds.
Desktop processors became fast enough about 5 years ago*
*Except for Gentoo users
After apple announced they were going to look into ARM for lower power consumption it was obvious Intel would respond, guess we know how now.
Tom's Hardware was bought outright by Intel years ago, and has since written only glowing reviews of trending Intel products. What else did you expect to come out of that now-defunct propaganda machine?
Sounds like Intel is leading ARM along...give them a bit of a head start, then catch up, then...
I come here for the love