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."

Comments

Re:30%?

[wonkey_monkey]

In other tests, one chip was shown to use 100% less power when switched off.

Look at all the silicon used for crypto

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

ARM vs x86

[IYagami]

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."

Re:ARM vs x86

[Sycraft-fu]

Ya I think ARM fanboys need to step back and have a glass of perspective and soda. There seems to be this article of faith among the ARM fan community that ARM chips are faster per watt, dollar, whatever than Intel chips by a big amount. Also that ARM could, if they wish, just scale their chips up and make laptop/desktop chips that would annihilate Intel price/performance wise. However for some strange reason, ARM just doesn't do that.

The real reason is, of course, it isn't true. ARM makes excellent very low power chips. They are great when you need something for a phone, or an integrated controller (Samsung SSDs use an ARM chip to control themselves) and so on. However that doesn't mean they have some magic juju that Intel doesn't, nor does it mean they'll scale without adding power consumption.

In particular you can't just throw cores at things. Not all tasks are easy to split down and make parallel. You already find with with 4/6 core chips on desktops. Some things scale great and use 100% of your CPU (video encoding for example). Others can use all the cores, but only to a degree. You see some games like this. They'll use one core to capacity, another near to it, and the 3rd and 4th only partially. Still other things make little to no use of the other cores.

So ARM can't go and just whack together a 100 core chip and call it a desktop processor and expect it to be useful.

Really, Intel is quite good at what they do and their chips actually are pretty efficient in the sector they are in. A 5-10 watt laptop/ultrabook chip does use a lot more than an ARM chip in a smartphone, but it also does more.

Also Intel DOES have some magic juju ARM doesn't, namely that they are a node ahead. You might notice that other companies are talking about 22/20nm stuff. They are getting it ready to go, demonstrating prototypes, etc. Intel however has been shipping 22nm stuff, in large volume, since April of last year. They are now getting ready for 14nm. Not ready as in far off talking about, they are putting the finishing touches on the 14nm fab in Chandler, they have prototype chips actually out and testing, they are getting ready to finalize things and start ramping up volume production.

Intel spends billions and billions a year on R&D, including fab R&D, and thus has been a node ahead of everyone else for quite some time. That alone gives them an advantage. Even if all other things are equal, they've smaller gates, which gives them lower power consumption.

None of this is to say ARM is bad, they are very good at what they do as their sales in the phone market shows. But ARM fans need to stop pretending they are some sleeping behemoth that could crush Intel if only they felt like it. No, actually, Intel's stuff is pretty damn impressive.

Re:ARM vs x86

[garethjrowlands]

If you have a way to split all tasks down and make them parallel, could you please share it with the rest of us? If it's this 'program algebra' of which you speak, could you please provide us with a link?

Re: 30%?

[Bram Stolk]

Parent is correct.
Power usage goes up with *square* of voltage, but is *linear* with clock speed.

Frequency does not matter much, voltage does.

Re:How much does this help?

[bzipitidoo]

Helps a lot. But there are many factors that affect power usage.

Power supplies used to be awful. I've heard of efficiencies as bad as 55%. Power supplies have their own fans because they burn a lot of power. Around 5 years ago, manufacturers started paying attention to this huge waste of power. Started a website, 80plus.org. Today, efficiencies can be as high as 92%, even 95% at the sweet spot.

GPUs can be real power pigs. I've always gone with the low end graphics not just because it's cheap, but to avoid another fan, and save power. The low end cards and integrated graphics use around 20W, which is not bad. I think a high end card can use over 100W.

A CRT is highly variable, using about 50W if displaying an entirely black image at low resolution, going up to 120W to display an all white image at its highest resolution. An older flatscreen, with, I think, fluorescent backlighting, uses about 30W no matter what is being displayed. A newer flatscreen with LEDs takes about 15W.

Hard drives aren't big power hogs. Motors take lots of power compared to electronics, but it doesn't take much to keep a platter spinning at a constant speed. Could be moving the heads takes most of the power.

These days, a typical budget desktop computer system, excluding the monitor, takes about 80W total. Can climb over 100W easy if the computer is under load. So, yes, a savings of 5W or more is significant enough to be noticed, even on a desktop system.