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Intel Shows 14nm Broadwell Consuming 30% Less Power Than 22nm Haswell
MojoKid writes "Kirk Skaugen, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the PC Client Group at Intel, while on stage, at IDF this week snuck in some additional information about Broadwell, the 14nm follow up to Haswell that was mentioned during Brian Krzanich's opening day keynote. In a quick demo, Kirk showed a couple of systems running the Cinebench multi-threaded benchmark side-by-side. One of the systems featured a Haswell-Y processor, the other a Broadwell-Y. The benchmark results weren't revealed, but during the Cinebench run, power was being monitored on both systems and it showed the Broadwell-Y rig consuming roughly 30% less power than Haswell-Y and running fully loaded at under 5 watts. Without knowing clocks and performance levels, we can't draw many conclusion from the power numbers shown, but they do hint at Broadwell-Y's relative health, even at this early stage of the game."
Meaningless number unless we know they are comparing at same performance level. You can get another IvyBridge CPU, downclock it, and you'll get 30% less power use.
Without knowing clocks and performance levels, we can't draw many conclusion from the power numbers shown
Intel Shows 14nm Broadwell Consuming 30% Less Power Than 22nm Haswell
So a processor running at an unknown speed is using less power than a different processor running at an unknown speed, not to mention several other unknown factors, and we're going to write a story about that with a specific power savings?
How much does lowering CPU power usage help? How much of a computer's power usage comes from the CPU, instead of the GPU, the screen, the LEDs, the disks, etc?
Arm meanwhile has 8 core processors suitable for Smartphones (and yes they can run all 8 cores simultaneously).
What they need right now is an a chip *now* that is 30% less power THAN AN EQUIVALENT ARM, and more cores and cheaper, oh and it also needs to be SOC available.
Really saying you're next chip is 30% lower power than one you just launched, means the one you just launched is 30% too much power drawn. Which is true, but not something to point out.
Take a look at this slide, on the right is the system on a chip version of their Broadwell 2 core processor:
http://hothardware.com/image_popup.aspx?image=big_idf-2013-8.jpg&articleid=27335&t=n
See how much of the chip is assigned to crypto functions? It's almost as big as one of the processor cores. All that silicon used for crypto and it's completely wasted because it cannot be trusted because of the NSA. It wouldn't surprise me if some of that silicon is NSA back door functionality because that's one heck of a lot of transistors to assign to crypto functions.
There is a good comparison of ARM vs x86 power efficiency at anandtech.com: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6536/arm-vs-x86-the-real-showdown
"At the end of the day, I'd say that Intel's chances for long term success in the tablet space are pretty good - at least architecturally. Intel still needs a Nexus, iPad or other similarly important design win, but it should have the right technology to get there by 2014."
(...)
"As far as smartphones go, the problem is a lot more complicated. Intel needs a good high-end baseband strategy which, as of late, the Infineon acquisition hasn't been able to produce. (...) As for the rest of the smartphone SoC, Intel is on the right track."
The future for CPUs is going to be focused on power consumption. The new Atom core is two times more powerful at the same power levels than the current Atom core. You can see http://www.anandtech.com/show/7314/intel-baytrail-preview-intel-atom-z3770-tested:
" Looking at our Android results, Intel appears to have delivered on that claim. Whether we’re talking about Cortex A15 in NVIDIA’s Shield or Qualcomm’s Krait 400, Silvermont is quicker. It seems safe to say that Intel will have the fastest CPU performance out of any Android tablet platform once Bay Trail ships later this year.
The power consumption, at least on the CPU side, also looks very good. From our SoC measurements it looks like Bay Trail’s power consumption under heavy CPU load ranges from 1W - 2.5W, putting it on par with other mobile SoCs that we’ve done power measurements on.
On the GPU side, Intel’s HD Graphics does reasonably well in its first showing in an ultra mobile SoC. Bay Trail appears to live in a weird world between the old Intel that didn’t care about graphics and the new Intel that has effectively become a GPU company. Intel’s HD graphics in Bay Trail appear to be similar in performance to the PowerVR SGX 554MP4 in the iPad 4. It’s a huge step forward compared to Clover Trail, but clearly not a leadership play, which is disappointing."
The CPU is the GPU in low power systems, they are integrated units. Gone is the time when integrated Intel GPUs were worthless. These days, they can handle stuff quite well, even modern games at lower resolutions. The display is still a non-trivial power user too but the CPU is a big one.
Disks aren't a big deal when you go SSD, which is what you want to do for the ultra low power units. They use little in operation, and less than a tenth of a watt when idle.
So ya, keeping CPU power low is a big thing for low power laptops. Doesn't matter so much if you have a big desktop replacement with a 17" screen, dual drives, discrete GPU and all that, but even then it can help when you are on battery. I have such a laptop and it is amazing, I can get 2-3 hours of battery life when using the iGPU and doing regular web surfing and the like. No longer do you have to have a behemoth that really has a battery only as a joke. While it needs to be plugged in to spool all the way up and run powerful stuff, it can crank down nicely for mobile use and the low power CPU is part of that.
Of course the real target isn't laptops like that, but smaller ones that just have the iGPU, have a lower power CPU, and a smaller, not as bright, screen. They can then last for a whole day on a battery no problem.
At least that is what is implied. That is great for corporate energy usel but when will the real power hogs be addressed? Expansion video cards can use many multiples the power consumed by the rest of the system combined.
If the trend keeps up, we'll get a 1-3% IPC improvement, and even less overclocking headroom with Broadwell. It's absolutely disappointing that after waiting ~5 years, a fully overclocked 4770K (~4.4GHz) is only 1.37x as fast as a fully overclocked i7 920 (~4GHz).
Suppose they actually scaled the transistors proportionally with the 22nm to 14nm features size reduction. That would be a reduction to less than half the area, but still 70% of the power. That means that the power density (and thus heat per unit area) would be higher, 1.7x the old value. One of the hopes from the smaller process is to be able to run faster, which means even more power. This seems unrealistic given that current processors are already thermally limited. We are way past the point where die shrinks offer faster operation, or increases in density close to what would be expected based on the feature size changes. It might help get some latency sensitive stuff closer together, maybe fit some more cache or cores, and perhaps lower power and area/cost for low power non thermally limited chips, but its not going to a lot to get you a much faster desktop for single threaded stuff, and only ~30% for highly multi-threaded (thermally limited) work.
So that's great for mobile chips for devices with batteries but they tend to go the same direction with their desktop chips. That opens the door for AMD to release a double or triple the wattage chip that's less efficient but faster overall and they price it at a far better "speed vs price" ratio that takes money right out of Intel's pockets. My advice to Intel is release some hyper-efficient but still 90W-ish 4.5-5.0GHz chip. AMD wouldn't get anywhere near that kind of performance.