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First Intel 14nm Broadwell Core M Benchmarks Unveiled

Posted by samzenpus on from the check-it-out dept.

MojoKid writes Intel Execs out at IDF this week in San Francisco have let slip some actual benchmark run results on Intel's just-released Broadwell Core M processor platform. Intel has gone into detail on Broadwell's architecture and features previously and has discussed power consumption and performance expectations. However, now we finally have some cold, hard numbers, rather than just percentage comparisons versus previous generation Intel platforms. Intel was demonstrating a 12.5-inch Broadwell-based, Core M 5Y70-powered Windows tablet live and the benchmark runs look promising, with 3DMark scores in the 50K range. The Cinebench results shown place the CPU on par with full-fledged Core i5 notebook variants in the 15 Watt power envelope, but powered by the new 4.5 Watt Broadwell Y Core M processor that will be employed mostly in 2-in-1 hybrid devices and high end tablets.

51 comments

  1. Battery life by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Let's hope the manufacturers will use the lower power consumption for prolonging the battery life rather than cutting down the capacity of batteries for cost saving :/

    1. Re:Battery life by galabar · · Score: 1

      I would expect manufacturers to attempt to provide what the majority of customers want while attempting to keep their costs and the price of the tablet within reason (within range of their competitors). What else would they do?

    2. Re:Battery life by thieh · · Score: 1

      They will cut down the battery size because it looks cool and because Tesla is buying up all the batteries.

    3. Re:Battery life by ArcadeMan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Smaller battery, smaller cost, smaller weight, smaller/thinner device.

      What do you think is going to happen?

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    4. Re:Battery life by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      duh, the price will go up, of course.

    5. Re:Battery life by rahenri · · Score: 1

      Given how disposable tablets are now, I rather they make it cheap rather than adding only a 20-30%battery life (numbers taken from my ass). Wake me up when you can have a 5x battery life improvement.

    6. Re:Battery life by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      Let's hope the manufacturers will use the lower power consumption for prolonging the battery life rather than cutting down the capacity of batteries for cost saving :/

      Actually, let's hope that they do both, in different devices, and let consumers decide for themselves whether they want longer battery life, or thinner/cheaper devices. When I come home at the end of a long day, my smartphone usually still has a 90% charge. I don't need longer battery life.

    7. Re:Battery life by Jonifico · · Score: 1

      Good point. It's more of an aesthetic upgrade, for performance addicts, we need Alienware (and lots of money, come to that).

  2. ARM's number is up by CajunArson · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The silly notion that splashing ARM across your chip means it will always win in low-power devices just got the final nail driven into its coffin.

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
    1. Re:ARM's number is up by ArcadeMan · · Score: 3, Informative

      It depends. If the ARM can do roughly the same work with only 2.25 watts, that's still 100% more efficient. Don't let the small wattage confuse the big picture.

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    2. Re:ARM's number is up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Only if the ARM and the Broadwell are equal in performance which they aren't. Otherwise the ARM is worse in performance/watt.

    3. Re:ARM's number is up by ArcadeMan · · Score: 2

      If ARM really is worst in performance/watt then the only things that could save it are custom CPUs, a lower cost and multiple manufacturers.

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    4. Re:ARM's number is up by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Some time back they were comparing Intel's newest low power CPU to ARM's. They both had nearly identical idle, but Intel's CPU consumed about 50% more peak power, but had about +80% peak performance, and was x86. Not to say that is the case this time, but Intel has already been dipping into ARM territory.

    5. Re:ARM's number is up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ARM has been worse in performance/watt for many years.

    6. Re:ARM's number is up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If the ARM can do roughly the same work with only 2.25 watts, that's still 100% more efficient.

      Agreed, but consider that the 10 inch LCD display that is also in that tablet consumes more than double the 4.5W the CPU is using. There is a point where you start to get very small marginal increases in battery life for large increases in power efficiency. At 4.5W Intel has gotten themselves firmly inside that envelope where that extra 100% ARM CPU power efficiency doesn't matter very much overall.

      Easy customization is the only really compelling thing going for ARM now.

    7. Re:ARM's number is up by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

      If it takes 4 times as long at 2.25 watts, it doesnt matter: It will use more battery.

    8. Re:ARM's number is up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What part of 'do roughly the same work' did you fail to comprehend, fanboy?

  3. Power consumption by mike449 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Performance increases have been evolutionary for quite some time now, no major news expected this time.
    What is really important is the power consumption and battery life. Each new process shrink roughly halves the power while keeping the performance. Will be interesting to see if this trend holds.

  4. At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by edxwelch · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's more expensive than the total cost of many tablets
    http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/...

    1. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 1

      You really think OEMs pay that price?

    2. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      These chips are an order of magnitude faster than the fastest tablet ARM chips. If you look at performance/watt the intel chips are much more efficient too.

      The advantage of the arm chips remains that can operate in a lower power envelope. Their drawback is they cant approach the speed of the intel chips. (Intel chips are more expensive though)

      Intel is the best chip maker in the world. Their fabrication tech is a full 2 generations ahead of their nearest competitors. When intel decides to pull their head out of their own ass and focus on something serious they do quite well.

      In my oppionon Intel's problems are entirely management driven. When they finally decided to ditch the netburst arch and develop the core/core2 they left AMD in the dust and have to this day. They've taken a long time to take mobile seriously. If they do, they will leave ARM in the dust as well.

      If you're an opensource advocate I would welcome intel with wide open arms. Your typical ARM SoC is a fucking nightmare labyrinth of never-updated closed source drivers, zero documentation and one-off hackish implementations with no standards. (Just ask the Cyanogen devs) Sure, you can get cheap ARM chips but good luck trying to get anything but the example android mystery build that came with it to do anything useful.

      You're going to have a lot more luck with an intel SoC. Open drivers, open specs, good documentation. Though there are a few exceptions with certain atom GPUs, 99 times out of 10 they'll be a hell of a lot easier to work with than an ARM device.

    3. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      Your typical ARM SoC is a fucking nightmare labyrinth of never-updated closed source drivers, zero documentation and one-off hackish implementations with no standards.

      But it's awesome how my brand new octo-core SoC only comes with Linux 3.4 support.

    4. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by TemporalBeing · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You really think OEMs pay that price?

      OEMs may not pay that price, but what they will pay is still quite a bit more than the ARM chips that are available to them.

      --
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    5. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by Moof123 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Intel seems to be a full generation behind ARM in making efficient chips, but has used the 2 generation head start their fab has on everyone to cover that game, and then some now.

      The story I got from my friends who work there (circa 1 year ago) is that they are scared to death that the tablet/phone markets escaped them. Desktop replacements have slowed, and they missed the boat on phones/tablets. They suck at being lean and mean, so they have almost always just outgrown their screw-ups. Chips like this make it clear that they really have made strides to close the gaps where they could.

      It still stands that they have to push out an entrenched ARM competitor, and they appear to be trying to do so by targetting the 2 in 1 side rather than tablets directly.

    6. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by timeOday · · Score: 2

      Intel doesn't have enough 14 nm production to flood the world market for no-name Chinese tablets anyways. This is the latest and greatest, not the bargain basement.

    7. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Intel seems to be a full generation behind ARM in making efficient chips"

      Citation needed.

    8. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >The advantage of the arm chips remains that can operate in a lower power envelope.
      What does power envelope mean? Or is this a fancier way of saying that arms can operate at low power?

    9. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, but with an extra bit of info that the author is a bullshit artist.

    10. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by jon3k · · Score: 1

      It's also much faster than most tablets.

    11. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by Kjella · · Score: 1

      Intel seems to be a full generation behind ARM in making efficient chips, but has used the 2 generation head start their fab has on everyone to cover that game, and then some now.

      Intel has been very good at making efficient CPUs, but not systems. If you want to make a <5W SoC there's a whole lot of other skills you need than a 15-150W processor and Intel has clearly been on a steep learning curve there. Also they've been geared a lot towards efficient computing, while the chips that go into phones and tablets are far more about being efficient at idle and light load. Intel has been learning many new tricks to only power up what they need in the lowest possible power state for a short a time as possible. The improvements for a processor running at 100% load 24x7 has been far more moderate.

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    12. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by Type44Q · · Score: 1

      Comparing high-end mobile x86 chips to ARM is comparing apples to oranges. Don't agree? Look at the transistor counts.

    13. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Cheap POS tablet won't do shit compared to my Surface Pro 3.

      Lmao is $281 expensive? I'm sure you can cook one up in your back yard for half the price!

    14. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, it's actually $281,000 for 1000 of them.

    15. Re:At $281, a bit expensive for a tablet CPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, look at the transistor count. Apple A8 ~2B transistors, Core M ~1.4B transistors.

      Apple make, by far, the best performing ARM-systems. Other might be OK for simple stuff but lets face, it the memory subsystem on ARM != Apple sucks. Intel and ARM might be close in Geekbench, but real-world applications that cannot run from L1-cache is way faster even on Silvermont than the highest end Cortex A15 released to date.

      Apple A8 will beat BayTrail-T, but it will be less than a factor of two in the CPU-department, the performance figures leaked so far for Core M put it at 3-4 times the single threaded performance compared to Z377x which is the fastest BayTrail-T.

  5. Good for tablets and laptops, but also..... by Dega704 · · Score: 2

    Maybe I'm weird for being mostly interested in what kind of new NUC platforms Broadwell will give us. The mobile rush has been good for desktop systems from an evolutionary standpoint. I have already built a few systems the size of a WiFi router with zero moving parts.

    1. Re:Good for tablets and laptops, but also..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The NUC is kind of a sleeper hit for intel. They're fast, well documented, easy to get a hold of, and reasonably priced.

      You can get cheap tiny system from china, but they're poorly documented and poorly supported and QC is often bad. I've heard a lot of stories of business and buying NUCs by the truckload because they're a lot of high quality computer in a tiny package for a good price.

    2. Re:Good for tablets and laptops, but also..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I keep waiting for people to catch on to just how awesome the NUC thing is.

      Desktop towers will be museum pieces sooner than later. All-in-ones and monitors with NUCs vesa mounted on the back will be[should be] the future "Desktop".

    3. Re:Good for tablets and laptops, but also..... by stor · · Score: 1

      With you :)

      Light on details but I thought you might be slightly interested:
      http://www.pcworld.com/article...

      Pertinent point: "Now, Intel’s next NUCs are taking aim at the 14-nm Broadwell generation. No, not the Core M, the chip that Intel just announced for tablets and some notebooks. Intel designed the Broadwell-U derivative for NUCs, a 15-watt dual-core chip for ultrabooks and NUCs that should arrive with a slower graphics core than Intel’s more mainstream chips."

      Stor

      --
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  6. Company life by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 1

    "What else would a manufacturer do", you ask?
    How 'bout "never mind the customer, maximize profits, and prolongue the mere existence of the company."?,[<-- hey look,
    four interpunction signs in succession] not necessarily in that order.

    1. Re:Company life by galabar · · Score: 1

      The companies that do that will go out of business and the companies that please the customer won't.

    2. Re:Company life by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In what kind of theoretical fantasy world are you living?
      And can I join?

    3. Re: Company life by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To clarify, galabar is correct. The fantasy world to which you pay reference is called a "market economy".

      Surely, nothing functions perfectly in every situation. However this is the power of market-based incentives over its participants, and it is what has made nations structured in such a manner so much more successful than their centrally-managed counterparts.

      Economics. It's not that hard.

  7. someone had to say it by kizh · · Score: 1

    Pawn Shop Clerk: [Hands the Terminator a tablet] These are brand new; we just got them in. That's a good tablet. Just touch the button, the beam comes on and you put the red dot where you want the image to go. You can't miss. Anything else? The Terminator: Phased plasma tablet in the 4 watt range.

  8. work/Joule by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 1

    or MIPS/Watt.

    work per Watt makes no sense.

    work/Joule is how "cheaply" you can get something done. MIPS/Watt is how fast you can get something done given a restricted power supply (or power envelope).

    --
    http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
  9. Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Tray price is absurd compared to ARM.

    Power/Performance looks nice, but ARM are still on 28nm mostly (or worse) - I'll be waiting to see 14/16nm ARM devices before I decide if this chip is acceptable or not.

  10. Daily announcement by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    Is it me, or is there a CPU announcement everyday now?

  11. 3 pieces of turd = Benchmark? by danknight48 · · Score: 1

    In the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, the Broadwell-based tablet we saw in action put up a score of 142.8 (with Internet Explorer running under Windows 8.1)

    Quite possibly the 3 most inefficient and slowest performing items ever created in the era of computing.
    Lets fling em together and benchmark everything based on multiple turds!