Intel Bay Trail Brings New Architecture and Performance To Atom

Vigile writes "Today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the company officially released the Atom Z3000 series of SoCs (Bay Trail) based on the Silvermont architecture. Unlike previous Atom designs, the Z3000 and Silvermont is a completely re-architected product from the ground up and is no longer based on legacy processors. Changes include a move to an out-of-order x86 architecture with drastically improved single threaded performance but the removal of Intel's HyperThreading technology. Dual-core modules with 1MB of shared cache can be paired up to create a quad-core SoC that also includes upgraded graphics design. Intel is no longer depending on PowerVR for a GPU and has integrated a 4 EU (execution unit) Intel HD Graphics design that is very similar to the one used in Ivy Bridge. As a result, as tested at PC Perspective in both Windows 8.1 and Android 4.2.2, the Bay Trail part is as much as 4x faster in single threaded tasks and 3.5x faster in gaming and graphics. Power consumption remains nearly the same as it did with Clover Trail (Atom Z2760) but with improved power gating and support for Connected Standby, Intel's new Atom looks and feels completely different than any before it." MojoKid notes that Intel also announced an "open" SoC architecture (where open involves you giving Intel tons of money).

Comments

Been waiting for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

This chip family is Intel's first real answer to arm SoCs. I look forward to seeing devices that feature it. Supposedly it will enable sub-100 dollar windows 8 tablets. (Well, excluding the win8 license probably. MS- You have a problem when your OS costs 2x more than the hardware itself.) - I'd love to pick up a 99 dollar tablet and see what I can do with a linux distro. I'd also love to see some ultra-small low cost SoC based boards. (Atomberry pi anyone?)

The x86 android port is supposed to be pretty damn good too, but intel seems to have a poor track record of actually getting shipping devices in to the hands of consumers.

Re:Been waiting for this.

[hairyfeet]

But how does it compare to the AMD Bobcats and Jaguars? To me THAT is the question. I have built many a system around the Bobcat and its pretty damned nice, more than powerful enough to replace the aging P4s in office environments while taking less power under load for the entire system than your average P4 idles at, great for netbooks, even low power servers, and the Jaguars are powerful enough that they are the chip of the Xbox N and PS4 while supposedly using little more than the Bobcats.

Every system with an Atom chip that has came into the shop...sigh...the words "mediocre" and "weak" instantly come to mind. AMD was able to boost their Bobcat by pairing it with a powerful GCN GPU and splitting the load, but lets face it Intel has never been great at GPU design so you ended up with a weak sauce CPU tied to a weak sauce GPU and that equals just painful to use.

So while I'll be happy to give 'em a spin if any ever walk through my door unless someone can show me some real world tests, NOT benchmarks because as we have seen the "Intel Cripple Compiler" makes any benchmark that doesn't announce which compiler they use suspect at best, I'll have to tell my customers to avoid Atoms, if they want Intel the i3s are ULV and at least have good performance.

Re:Been waiting for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Intel this is a complete redesign that has more in common with haswell than it does with older atoms. It's interesting to note that all Intel chips, pre haswell, have had bolt-on powersaving tech. Haswell and later chips are designed from the ground up with power management in mind.

The family has chips aimed at true mobile applications, like tablets and smartphones. It also has chips aimed at low end laptops and deskops, like the previous atom. I don't know how well they will compete with bobcat and Jaguar, and I'm not sure they're intended to compete in the same space. I think the Pentium line is what's meant to compete with those.

On paper it looks good. Out of order execution, super low power states, power state awareness between GPU and CPU, 64bit support, 2 or 4 cores. I'm eager to see benches and reviews of new hardware once it becomes generally available.

Re:Been waiting for this.

[0123456]

Isn't Intel's R&D budget greater than AMD's entire revenue?

I think they can afford to keep pushing high-end CPUs as well as low-end.

Re:Been waiting for this.

[hairyfeet]

Well then that CPU is effectively fucked, as I can tell ya that folks HATE Windows 8. Can't say as I blame 'em, I spent half the night having to hack the living shit out of Win 8 to make it into a system that was actually usable. For those that want to know how here are the steps and note that you can NOT "just add Start8 and be done", not by a long shot!

1.- Install and configure Start8, I turn off all the bling bling as it gives better performance on a laptop, how much or little you keep is up to you. 2.- type in "disable charms registry" to find the registry entires you will need to hack to kill the first half of that POS charms crap. ironic that they killed gadgets because "they were a security risk" when gadgets were actually useful, charms is just fucking irritating. 3.- Finally look up "synaptics generic touchpad driver" and pray to FSM that it supports your touchpad, otherwise seriously think about disabling your touchpad and going with a mouse, otherwise retarded Win 8 will read any halfway fast move on the touchpad as a "swipe" and cockblock you with the charms box!

After you do ALL of that, along with striping out the ad laden crap and Metro garbage "apps"...fuck I hate that damned word now, the second anyone uses that word now I automatically think "hipster douche" thanks to its buzzword overuse...anyway once you do ALL of that, around 4-5 hours depending on how much extra third party crap is left? You will actually have a functional laptop/desktop, without? If you aren't on a cellphone it will drive you up the damned wall as Win 8 is so obviously built around touch that it hurts and without touch it feels like it is actively fighting the user every step of the way.

But I wouldn't wish Win 8 on my worst enemy, yes its THAT bad. Anybody who doubts it should watch this video followed by this video showing what a REAL normal user goes through with Windows 8. Count how many times he says "no" "stop" and "I don't want that" in the video, he is unable to even do basic tasks as Win 8 is fighting him every step thanks to making poorly done half ass touch sensing the "centerpiece" of the shit sandwich.

Re:Been waiting for this.

[Rockoon]

Its not just the benchmark code either. Benchmarks often link to pre-compiled math libraries that themselves were compiled with ICC, so compiling the benchmark with Visual Studio or GCC doesnt help the situation any if you continue to link to those libraries.

In addition, you need to trust the benchmarkers themselves, and most of these tech sites that so often do benchmarks have conflicts of interest (advertising money, free review hardware, etc..) With this in mind I trust PassMarks online benchmark data more than any of review site even though the benchmarks are always entirely synthetic, because the benchmarks are crowd-sourced with anywhere from dozens to thousands of different people benchmarking a given piece of hardware on a wide array of setups.

Re:Been waiting for this.

[Billly Gates]

Well then that CPU is effectively fucked, as I can tell ya that folks HATE Windows 8. Can't say as I blame 'em, I spent half the night having to hack the living shit out of Win 8 to make it into a system that was actually usable. For those that want to know how here are the steps and note that you can NOT "just add Start8 and be done", not by a long shot!

I use Win8 on my desktop. I learned to ignore charms and use start button on the keyboard. I also do not use any metro apps. That is about it.I do not see why win8 is such a big problem. I see win8-specific stuff maybe 20-30 seconds a day max. It is entertaining to see people pissed for no reason but man.. relax. Get a beer or something. We lived through XP mickey mouse interface with unremovable moviemaker. We can handle charms, apps and metro. Man up!

I see the same reaction with XP loyalists such as these in pages 2 - 15 in this article? Besides the 1st comment titled UPGRADE!! everyone is bitching and moaning on how only XP can do this only XP can do that and they site examples like show desktop doesn't exist!! It does it is that rectangle on the right. No sticky keys OMG .. uh enable them and they are there. One of them was a CIO who bashed those on modern operating systems saying he makes sure all his workplace computers are 12 years old because they are "familiar to him". Are you serious? What kind of CIO does nothing for 12 years? They love their blues and greens and that grassed hill in the background more than they want to change.

Change is hard and I bet if MS removed METRO in Windows 9 you would be irritated too because you are used to the limitation and annoyance of Windows 8 Modern by this time frame too right?

In reality though the complaints agaisn't 8 on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard are real. I do not get why I would click on the news tile and have no menu or functions and would have to move the mouse all over for just 3 of them full screen? Aero glass is gone and so is aero snap and Windows 7 instant search. That is a bummer too for multitaskers. Sure if someone put a gun to my head Hairy and I *could* use it but it is not optimized for desktops.

I could get used to Windows 8.1 and Metro if I could get aero back, stacked tiles similiar to programs in the Windows 7 task bar, better control with a task bar for Metro and mouse integration. I would still feel uncomfortable because I do not like change but your argument then would be more valid. XP was a great OS for its time and anyone could get rid of that fisher price UI. It did not remove any functionality from Windows 98 with the exception of poorly written dos apps in assembly.

Good, Screw you PowerVR

[h4rr4r]

Hopefully, this will end any reliance on PowerVR by Intel. I dream that this is the beginning of the end for those bastards.

Re:Good, Screw you PowerVR

[bill_mcgonigle]

Just to add to what you're saying here, allow me to illustrate.

I was doing some embedded FreeBSD work on an Atom board, and it had the PowerVR GPU. The VGA text console was all scrambled. This was in 2011, it's not like VGA is all that new.

It turns out that the VGA spec itself says that data can be written to the frame buffer in half-byte words. Every VGA implementation that FreeBSD had ever encountered worked with writing VGA text console data to the frame buffer a byte at a time. Until 20[8-10] when PowerVR decided to implement the letter of the spec, making it incompatible with at least the entire BSD world, and not so much as bother to test it. I'm going to assume they never bothered to test BSD because the other option is that they did test it, knew it was broken, probably knew why, but failed to send up a simple patch to the devs.

This would all have been fine and dandy except Intel decided to bolt their GPU onto their Atom platform. I dunno, maybe there was a patent licensing deal that caused this to happen, but sheesh - good riddance!

OPEN SOURCE GPU DRIVERS!!!

[CajunArson]

It turns out that Bay Trail has some very solid performance numbers and that the power consumption is very good too, but frankly, you can get similar results from high-end ARM SoCs.

What you can't get, however, are 100% GLPd GPU drivers that are already in the mainline Linux kernel. THANK YOU INTEL and I hope this is a wakeup call to the ARM vendors that the days of crappy, unsupported binary blobs are hopefully coming to an end.

Re:OPEN SOURCE GPU DRIVERS!!!

[h4rr4r]

Does it matter?
If I can get even comparable power consumption sign me up. I am sick of this binary driver ARM bullshit.

agreed

[PhrostyMcByte]

PowerVR has some of the most pathetic support for x86 and Windows I've ever seen, and it hasn't got any better. With my fanless Shuttle PC using an Atom N2800, I have a choice of either 32-bit Windows and glitchy graphics, 64-bit Windows and VGA output, or Linux with VGA output. It's pretty obvious why, of course... PowerVR's x86 market is so infinitesimally small compared to their ARM market, they probably hired some old printer driver developer to be the sole guy working on it stashed in a closet somewhere. It is really surprising that Intel ever decided to use them, without some sort of support contract built in.

ATOM SMASHER!

[DarthVain]

OK. I fail to the the point (market) of the Atom processor. Ditto for the AMD counterpart.

The reason I say this is because of A) miniaturization and power efficiency gains in traditional processors, and B) ARM and Motorola.

I just bought an i5 Haswell on an itx format. I could have got an i7 (or an i3 for that matter). They make laptops with all of those. Power usage is way down. If looking for "cheapness" past an i3, they still over Celerons more less. AMD likewise has some cheap lower powered chips.

ARM and Motorola (A# and Snapdragon basically) own the phone/tablet market. Nothing Intel or AMD do to their lines is going to change that.

For Atom and it's AMD counterpart fall somewhere in between the very cheap low end chip, and the ARM/Motorola chips. What are you making with these chips? Shitty netbook laptops? Sorry the processor is only part of the price of these things. Not to mention the death of the netbook due to the popularity of Tablets.

Anyway I just do not see the point of this processor segment at all.