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Intel Details Silvermont Microarchitecture For Next-Gen Atoms
crookedvulture writes "Since their debut five years ago, Intel's low-power Atom microprocessors have relied on the same basic CPU core. That changes with the next generation, which will employ an all-new Silvermont microarchitecture built using a customized version of Intel's tri-gate, 22-nm fabrication process. Silvermont ditches the in-order design of previous Atoms in favor of an out-of-order approach based on a dual-core module equipped with 1MB of shared L2 cache. The design boasts improved power sharing between the CPU and integrated graphics, allowing the CPU cores to scale up to higher speeds depending on system load and platform thermals. Individual cores can be shut down completely to provide additional clock headroom or to conserve power. Intel claims Silvermont doubles the single-threaded performance of its Saltwell predecessor at the same power level, and that dual-core variants have lower peak power draw and higher performance than quad-core ARM SoCs. Silvermont also marks the Atom's adoption of the 'tick-tock' update cadence that guides the development of Intel's Core processors. The successor to Silvermont will be built on 14-nm process tech, and an updated microarchitecture is due after that."
This thing is going to be a good buy going forward. Strong buy suggestion.
Silvermont is a just core (CPU). It sits inside an SoC (system on chip), and your final power figures will still depend on the efficiency of the rest of the SoC (the GPU, the IO interfaces, the memory interfaces, any other dedicated hardware, etc.). And even then, the integration of technology is getting to the point where the SoC's power consumption is only a partially limiting factor in battery life. During lower power states and standby states, the comms units, the display, etc. can all consume way more power than the core.
If power consumption when lightly loaded is competitive with ARM, then Intel may have something. Peak power consumption isn't as important for devices where the cpu is never pegged, or only pegged for a tiny fraction of a percentage of total time the cpu is running.
I have one arm dev board with an exynos4 on it, that has a huge heatsink on top. Pull the heatsink, and you never get even close to speed/power consumption when running with heatsink at 100% cpu. I have yet to see a phone with a heatsink as big as the phone, so I suspect that these phones *never* see 100% cpu, or only see it for such a short period of time (before thermal throttling takes place), that peak power usage is meaningless for most devices using arm SOCs.
I hope Intel pulls it off. It would be nice if power consumption factored larger in their other offerings too.
It's going to be interesting to compare this to AMD's new G-series low power processors. The G-series will have a GPU attached similar to what will go into the PS4 and the XBOX720
If they cost the $649 the iphone 5 or Galaxy S4 cost what is the point in switching?
i'd rather buy something that has market share unless there is a compelling reason t buy something else
I see small low power chips advancing much faster then mainstream PC architecture style chips.
I wonder if they'll play catch up before we see more advance in the Moores Law department?
-don't mod me, I'm just a curious ac
ARM and Samsung have the mobile SoC market by the balls. Atom became irrelevant when netbooks gave way to tablets and phablets.
Companies like Intel and Microsoft should really stop chasing the smartphone and tablet bandwagon and focus on what they're good at: desktops and servers.
If they remain on this idiotic path, they run the risj of alienating their traditional customers AND never catching up to the mobile markets they drool over.
them 20 years to catch up to Alpha and MIPS. And all the while China has been developing and manufacturing those Alphas and MIPSs... I believe the current generations are mostly reserved for military usages, like Alpha-like rugged laptops that run over 24hr with a modern linux distro or MIPS encrypted comms with weeks of power with a proper OS instead of a micro-controller.
You already lost $12.00, congratulations!
and other pARty
Atom became irrelevant when netbooks gave way to tablets and phablets.
ARM tablets and phablets failed to make showing more than one thing on the screen at the same time a standard feature. If a tablet's screen is as big as three phones' screens, why can't it run three phone apps side by side? The only tablets that ship with multi-window multitasking as a standard feature of the operating system are Surface Pro and other Windows 8 tablets, and these use x86.
First ARM ignores Atom.
Then ARM laughs at Atom.
Then ARM fights Atom.
Then Atom wins..
.. to taste some of the Windows RT fail..
(There is no real need of x86 tablet processors..)
Hm. My first thought when reading the headline was to imagine a world where a scientist is making this announcement about real atoms. Absolutely mind-blowing.
I'm wondering when we'll see AMD64 support on their Atom offerings. You don't see ARM's 64-bit offerings on phones yet, but their higher-end offerings need to handle that kind of memory. Meanwhile there are multiple phones with 2GB of main memory in circulation, I doubt it will be too much longer before phones need to handle that kind of memory.
Silvermont looks pretty good. The only weak spot is the Graphics. It only has 4 EU compaired to the 16 EU in the HD 4000. The article says "I wouldnâ(TM)t be too surprised to see something at or around where the iPad 4â(TM)s GPU is today". That's pretty unlikely. If you consider that iPad4 has 76.8 GFLOPS. The Silvermont GPU would have to be clocked at 1200 Mhz to achieve the same performance - (only the top end Ivy Bridge parts are clocked that high)
Intel has paid sites like Slashdot to proclaim every Atom chip to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, and each Atom core has actually managed to be worse (in its sector) than the previous design. Remember, Intel is the company that spent more than the combined R+D budget of ATI and Nvidia combined (across their entire history) to produce the Larrabee GPU, the worst graphics chip ever designed, and the greatest semi-conductor flop in the history of forever.
Intel has exactly one success to its name- producing a moderately faster desktop x86 CPU core than AMD by outspending AMD by hundreds to one. Even in this incredibly limited field, AMD has actually bested Intel TWICE in x86 history. Intel is a dreadful, dreadful company, successful only because of its de facto (effective) monopoly in the x86 business.
Intel's current and coming mobile CPU cores are slaughtered in every important metric by AMDs astonishing new Jaguar cores, but it gets worse. Jaguar cores are simply part of the best x86 SoC (system on a chip) part ever produced, including the very best integrated GPU, and a massive step toward true HSA computing (Intel hasn't even begun to change its architecture to support any aspect of HSA).
Jaguar supports every current x86 instruction option. Intel ONLY supports the most recent instruction set improvements on its most expensive desktop parts. As you drop lower down Intel's line, they remove core features, ending in the utterly stripped down and crippled Atom line.
It gets worse. Intel's appalling GPU design (Intel was too thick to write drivers for the PowerVR licence it previously used- the same PowerVR architecture that powers all Apple mobile devices so successfully) stinks for any but the most basic use. Intel's integrated GPU cannot provide smooth gameplay, having massive variable frame latencies that always make rendering feel 'stuttery' (like the problem AMD has when using two ATI graphics cards together, only far far worse). Intel's GPU drivers are a compete horror, leaving most games full of visual glitches. Only games that get special attention from Intel's graphics teams have any chance or rendering acceptably of an Intel GPU.
It gets worse. Look at the coming Sony PS4- entirely designed using AMD's technology from 2014 (yes, that date is correct) desktop x86 parts. The single AMD chip that contains the EIGHT CPU cores, and the massively powerful GPU, moves almost everything the CPU might be used to process onto dedicated hardware blocks, or the GPU. Intel's CPUs are optimised around the concept of massively inefficient PC designs running a horrible Microsoft OS. Intel has a notable desktop lead over AMD because it handles these inefficiencies (like the massive over-heads when the scheduler switches active threads) better than AMD.
The PS4 architecture shows the future. A design that can finally run thousands of threads at the same time without over-heads that would use more than 100% of available CPU performance if attempted on the traditional desktop. Thread scheduling ARM based computers on the GPU itself to allow efficient COMPUTE threads to replace mega-slow FPU calculations on the CPU.
AMD and ARM are planning for a linear relationship between the transistors used, and performance. Intel's model is to double the transistor count for maybe 7% improvement in (traditional) CPU performance. It doesn't take a genius to figure out how this will work out for Intel.
Up to now, Intel has paid billions to software developers and Microsoft to focus on single-threaded performance. Such an approach has driven PC improvements into the ground, but has been incredibly successful in maintaining Intel's market share and profit margins. Behind the scenes, programmers were learning how to create 'work unit' based computing to drag every last ounce of computing from the ageing multi-core Xbox360 and PS3. This expertise, that perfectly scales to all multi-core designs, is the motivation behind the designs of both the PS4 and Xbox720, and all coming x86 parts from A
Always hard to read the tea leaves, but I predict a wave of new netbooks that will catch the market by surprise. I believe a wave of $350 netbooks running Bay Trail and Windows 8.1 will prove pretty popular. This will, of course, cannibalize the $1000 ultrabook sales, so this isn't to say it will be a revenue success. But Bay Trail would definitely make Netbook 2.0 pretty compelling.
* Numbers may be subject to change once verified with actual the parts.
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/6936/Screen%20Shot%202013-05-06%20at%2011.16.42%20AM.png
So this is marketing pulling figures out of somewhere and posting them as the Ultimate Truth, without actually having the hardware to test them with?
Is 'Tick' when the add more DRM and 'Tock' when they add the backdoors for the state security organs, or is it the other way around?
When on earth did China manufacture Alphas? They were originally fabbed only by DEC, then Mitsubishi & Samsung got into the act, finally, DEC fabs were sold to Intel, and Compaq/HP ended the processor. China was never involved in its manufacture.
Even for MIPS, China was never involved. Loongson was a Chinese company licensing a subset of the MIPS instruction set and making a CPU based on that. It however is different from the MIPS in that it supports certain x86 instructions on-chip, which of course defeats the idea of going RISC in the first place. Nor does it support the entire MIPS instruction set