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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."
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
Rumor has it that the first iPads ran on Atom and Apple found their power consumption to be too much for acceptable usage. If true, Apple thought that using a different chip architecture that they didn't use before was worth the hassle than working with Atom. Remember the iPad came first then got shelved for the iPhone.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Not quite. Atom is still good for non-gaming low-powered workstations and laptops. Pretty much every current computer I use, except the i5 at work that my boss pays the electric bill for.
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
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.
Yet their P/E is almost 10x better than ARMH... Stock Market = Kentucky Derby these days, everyone bets on the hot new horse trying to make a quick buck.
I love seeing articles that scream about their bias in the headline.
"Intel Has No Process Advantage In Mobile, says ARM CEO"
He may be referring to the idea, not to the product on sale. (That's from Jobs' mouth, not mine.)
Ezekiel 23:20
No offering from ARM or Samsung could do what I do with my Atom machine
If by "what I do with my Atom machine", you mean running x86 code, then perhaps you're right, but why exactly do you think that a 4-core, 1.5-2 GHz ARM solution with appropriate peripherals wouldn't be able to do the same thing?
Ezekiel 23:20
Is there an ARM-based board on the market with PCIe, at least 4 SATA ports, e-SATA, HDMI 1.4, Dual-link DVI, S/PDIF, 7.1 Audio? If there are, they are hard to find, but there are multiple Atom offerings. I require and use all of these things, but like a relatively low-power package. I'm not willing to solder up my own board either.
I agree (speaking from 2009) and (even here in 2013) still use an Atom(ION) HTPC. I love it, as far as hardware-I-already-have goes. But you need to check out the lowest-power Ivy Bridge and upcoming Haswells. They are seriously encroaching on what used to be Atom's power usage, except much much faster and without the need for any Nvidia chips or drivers. I am not kidding: think carefully and look at what's available, before you buy another Atom (or Bobcat) board. Atom is either a has-been in this area, or is fading fast. If Atom's going to continue, it has to invade ARM's market, because Haswell is invading Atom's market.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Is there any reason why an ARM core on a SoC couldn't have those peripherals integrated? You're talking about "ARM" and "Samsung", but what you're asking for is a board with connectors. Especially it doesn't make sense to ask ARM, of all companies, to deliver a board with connectors to you when all they do is to license CPU cores to SoC manufacturers. ARM doesn't even do their own silicon, the board is two companies removed. Truth is, I'm slowly getting more and more pissed as well, but you're really barking up the wrong tree.
Ezekiel 23:20
The only case - if Atom/Fusion tablets could somehow run Windows 7 apps on Windows 8
Apple first built tablet prototypes before the iPhone. When they realized they could shrink the components enough to make a cell phone, they shifted to making the iPhone first. This detail came from Jobs himself.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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)
Neither the first line nor the second actually apply to this discussion, if you read carefully. But that would require reading comprehension, nicht wahr?
Ezekiel 23:20
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 $1000 ultrabook sales, so this isn't to say it will be a revenue success. But Bay Trail would definitely make Netbook 2.0 pretty compelling.
Not on price, though it appears that this generation of Atom and Core are not very different. I suspect they will continue to converge in future generations until there are various flavors in a wider range of the same base technology.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
* 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?
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
They will converge until one cannibalizes much of the other's market on the power consumption spectrum (guess which).
Looks like AMD's budgeted priority for their marketing staff at the expense of their engineering staff is paying off.
Atom is going to more than just consumer phablet market segments. While you laugh, the roadmap is being laid down way outside the scope you just described.