Slashdot Mirror
Info On Intel Bay Trail 22nm Atom Platform Shows Out-of-Order Design
MojoKid writes "New leaked info from Intel sheds light on how the company's 2014 platforms will challenge ARM products in the ultra light, low power market. At present, the company's efforts in the segment are anchored by Cedar Trail, the 32nm dual-core platform that launched a year ago. To date, all of Intel's platform updates for Atom have focused on lowering power consumption and ramping SoC integration rather than focusing on performance — but Bay Trail will change that. Bay Trail moves Atom to a quad-core, 22nm, out-of-order design. It significantly accelerates the CPU core with burst modes of up to 2.7GHz, and it'll be the first Atom to feature Intel's own graphics processor instead of a licensed core from Imagination Technologies."
It is Always Reassuring When .... You spend a bunch of money on a new processor and they tell you it is already "Out of Order" from the get-go.
I, for one, will be overjoyed to see the last of Imagination's 'PowerVR' shit, especially on x86, and hope we'll never see the likes of the "GMA500" again.
On the other hand, this report has me wondering exactly what the Atom team is up to. Back when Intel started the whole 'Atom' business, the whole point of having a substantially different architecture, in-order, was to have something that could scale down to lower power in a way that their flagship designs couldn't. Since then, the ULV Core I3/5/7 chips have continued to improve on power consumption, and the Atoms have apparently been sprouting additional complexity and computational power. How much room do they have to do that before 'Atom' evolves itself right out of its power envelope, or Core ULV parts start hitting the same TDPs as higher-power Atoms; but with much more headroom?
I'm not sure I've ever seen iTunes earn that many exclaimation points since the days when Apple announced that iPods on Windows would no longer depend on 'Musicmatch Jukebox' for file transfer...
Runs all your x86 binaries.
By MS' own definition, uefi will support other os options (not guaranteed under ARM).
Has mature, supported foss GPU drivers unlike every android-only ARM SoC.
THE platform for that budget linux tablet that dual boots into MS Office?
The link is here. Basically some Atoms can not run WIndows 8, and clovertrail is specifically designed not to be Windows 7 compatible.
Unless any information has changed my suspicious part of me feels Intel feels threatens the low margin and is trying to make sure this stays only in tables and not in servers nor desktops which is shame. I see no reason to spend a tiny portion of R&D backporting WDDM1.2 to WDDM 1.1 so the graphics work with the Windows 7 kernel.
http://saveie6.com/
The imagination technology drivers aren't open source, which was a big issue. Moving to an Intel video board means that it will be released as free software (unless Intel changes its policy which is very unlikely). That's a very good news for the open source platforms!
Call my cynical with these. Intels clover is not Windows 7 compatible, and the previous are not Windows 8 compatible. If intel is blowing off Windows 7 without working drivers for their newest chipsets what makes you think they will support Linux either?
They want you to blow extra $$$ for an icore5 that you do not need, and are trying to make this for tablets and phones only to stop ARM.
http://saveie6.com/
New leaked info from Intel sheds light on how the company's 2014 platforms will challenge ARM products in the ultra light, low power market.
Intel is using the tactic perfected by Microsoft, i.e., compare your product plans from two or so years in the future with the current products of your competitor, and then say how much better your envisioned products are.
.
Intel is behind the 8-ball in the low power market space, and this is nothing less than a move of desperation on Intel's part.
The GPU on these chips, due to be released year-after-next, max out at the resolution of the 10" Nexus 10 from last year. That is a strategic error.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Dual ARM A15 chips destroy any current dual Atom from Intel. The coming quad A15 parts will destroy any Intel ULV i3 part (Intel's crown jewel CPU) that competes in the same space.
However, the A15 design is now years old. ARM is replacing it with a fully 64-bit part that uses only 60% of the same die space in the same process. This means that the ARM part that replaces the A15 early 2014 has either more performance or less energy use- a total nightmare for Intel.
Meanwhile, it is impossible for Intel to 'repeal' the Intel Tax. Intel is addicted to massive profits per chip, and cannot function on the margins made by those that manufacture the ARM SoC parts. Example: Intel is boasting support for 4K video on its next generation CPUs, but 4K support already exists on one of the cheapest ARM chips you can find in a tablet, the Allwinner A10.
When Atom goes 'out of order', it ceases to be an Atom, as is, instead, a renamed version of Intel's current 'core' architecture.Intel going quad with the Atom makes zero sense, when the targeted low power devices try to keep all but one core in idle for power-saving reasons. Intel can already thrash its own future Atom with the earlier mentioned ULV dual-core i3 part, as used in the latest Chromebook.
It gets worse. AMD and ARM are fully unifying the memory space of external memory as used by either the GPU cores or the CPU cores. Intel is going in the opposite direction, attempting to build on-die RAM blocks for the exclusive use of the GPU on versions of its chips aimed at high-end notebooks. This project is dying on its feet as notebook manufactures cannot believe the money Intel wants for this version of Haswell- they know if their notebook customers pay a lot for the product, they demand decent graphics from Nvidia or AMD, not half-working slow graphics rubbish from Intel.
It gets worse. Apple is on the verge of dumping Intel completely for their own ARM SoC designs. The high-end Apple desktop systems that would struggle with current ARM chips hardly make money for Apple anyway compared with the phones, tablets, and Airbooks.
It gets worse. Weak demand in the traditional PC marketplace means that Intel has growing spare capacity at its insanely expensive fabs. It tried to find customers for this free capacity, but Intel fabs are massively customised for Intel's own CPUs, and lack the technical support for other kinds of chips. Intel uses its outdated equipment to make other kinds of parts (like the dreadful Atoms, or the dreadful MB chipsets), but potential customers hardly want to make their new chips on these very old lines.
It gets worse. Global Foundries (AMD's chip production facility- that pretends to be independent) is making incredible strides in attracting business form many companies designing the most cutting edge ARM parts. Samsung's chip business is going from strength to strength. Apple is making massive investments at TSMC. The Chinese fabs are coming along in leaps and bounds.
It gets worse. The GPU is becoming by far the most important part of the modern SoC (system on a chip). Intel's GPU design is a distant fifth to the SoC GPUs from AMD, Nvidia, PowerVR and ARM itself. Of the five, only Intel's GPU still doesn't work properly, and is NOT compatible with modern graphics APIs. Intel has to hack its drivers even to get even a handful of the most popular games running with minimal glitches. Intel GPU = you will have massive compatibility issues.
Where is the Z80 today? The same question will be asked of x86/x64 tomorrow.
In an out-of-order thread the first post is not necessary the first post.
On a sidenote: I seriously hope resolutions will get better.. 1366x768 is at the very low end of my tolerance.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
My branch prediction showed that you were going to post that comment.