Intel Atom Z600

[liolio]

I realize that there is no proper thread on matter so I started a new thread.
Preview can be read here:
Techreport
Anandtech
tomshardware

I'm being possibly overly optimistic but I see this platform has the game changer in this market segment.
I don't expect it to take over the market in one or two year but it's clearly the Intel first tough blow in the direction of ARM. Put otherwise:

To paraphrase vice president Biden, this is a big f—ing deal. After attending this Moorestown briefing, I walked away fairly convinced that I’d just seen the future of mainstream computing. No, I’m not saying that I think 40% of the market will be toting around Moorestown-based devices next year. I mean that, if certain requisite elements are in place, I see no reason why the median form factor used for computing shouldn’t continue its march from the desktop to the pocket.

I see a lot a nitpicking and critics in the comment of the aforementioned sites but honestly I fail to see how to dismiss Intel achievement I didn't them to "get there" that fast.
OK it's still not perfect for smart-phone most likely due to first cost then form factor, but it's imho already almost a death blow to ARM supporting companies in the net-book segment.
I also read concern about the OS and the software and I don't see this as a problem at all. Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if Apple is actually the first to embraces Intel solution (say sometime in 2011).

I'm overly enthusiastic but when I read Anand article (the first up it seems) I could help but think "that's huge and it spells no good for competitors..."

 

[MfA]

Apple is married to ARM for the iPhone OS based devices ... it's a binary platform, a switch would be painful. The only potential OS X Atom platform would be a Netbook, and I don't think Apple would make a 360 on that. Besides, as long as they don't push gaming what the hell do they care if a processor is faster and/or has a process advantage?

Apple doesn't need Atom ... but their competitors need some way to make Atom more relevant. I personally think the best way to do that is by pushing gaming (real gaming, PSP style gaming or at the very least DS style gaming ... not mobile phone style gaming).

 

[Pressure]

I also don't see Apple going to throw away the $350 million in investments they did this last year on companies working on ARM designs (P.A. Semi and Intrinsity), even though it is pocket change for them.

Intel will become an option when the power management is better than what ARM designs can squeeze out at comparable performance.

 

[Lazy8s]

ARM designs still seem to be getting quite a bit more CPU performance per cost, so Apple should continue to push the hardware envelope in performance and integration with ARM for the foreseeable future.

Intel's aggressive push in graphics and also Medfield's process advantage will give them strong selling points, though, to some other market players.

 

[rpg.314]

I also don't see Apple going to throw away the $350 million in investments they did this last year on companies working on ARM designs (P.A. Semi and Intrinsity), even though it is pocket change for them.

Intel will become an option when the power management is better than what ARM designs can squeeze out at comparable performance.

Apple is free to choose any ISA as long as it is ARM.

 

[aaronspink]

Apple is free to choose any ISA as long as it is ARM.

You mean the ISA they helped architect from the company they helped found!

 

[Kurt]

The only potential OS X Atom platform would be a Netbook, and I don't think Apple would make a 360 on that.

What difference would it make?

 

[tangey]

Reading some articles on UMPCportal, and re-reading the anandtech article again, it appears that there maybe a yet unannounced variant of moorestown to come called moorestown-W. This *WILL* add the PCI support necessary to run full windows7 (i.e. not windows mobile). We heard some mutterings about moorestown-W quite a while back.

We also have heard about "oaktrail" which is apparently pinetrail replacement for netbooks.

It could well be that moorestown-W and oaktrail are one and the same. With a 400Mhz SGX535, it would give it twice the graphics performance of the existing Z series chipset being used in mids and some netbooks (and probably an increase on pinetrails graphics) AND give it full video decode capability without needing the seperate broadcom chip. And with the massive decrease in power useage, would give brilliant battery life.

Of course we've been here before with pinetrail, but it is a possibility.

 

[rpg.314]

You mean the ISA they helped architect from the company they helped found!

Yeah, the same ISA on which 2e5 apps for their platform run.

 

[liolio]

Yeah, the same ISA on which 2e5 apps for their platform run.

In which languages those apps are coded?

 

[MfA]

What difference would it make?

Well they'd look silly ... which is not a big deal, but regardless I don't think they will do a 360 on the netbook issue.

 

[rpg.314]

In which languages those apps are coded?

In a family of languages famed for combining the power of an assembly with the portability of an assembly.

 

[liolio]

In a family of languages famed for combining the power of an assembly with the portability of an assembly.

I guess I didn't get properly what Mfa meant by binary platform.

So I'll agree that Apple may not shift in near future as the touted difference in performances is not worse the software expenses. Still as other pointed other than Apple may find the platform interesting for tablets.
I'm not fond of cell/smart phone at all, I see them as some sort of enslavement and I personally don't need them for professional reasons, net book on the other hand...
I'm willing to see Intel declination of the platform intended for net-book say a two cores variations supporting PCI. As I don't play on my computer I'm getting more and more bothered by encumbrance of standard pc. It's huge and then come the cables/wires. I got a used laptop for free from my job and it's still too big, autonomy is too low, etc. Net-book based on Atom could be perfect for my daily use. Intel has a winner here imho, putting Apple talk aside we can pretty much say that Intel has already made a victim: Nvidia ion2 platform is set to disappear soon, Via will also have a tough time competing too.

Overall after reading quiet some comments on various forum I've the feeling that a lot of the talk mostly against Intel is a manifestation of the old RISK vs CISC war or more "Intel vs the world". A lot of people want to see in ARM the RISK stronghold that may threaten Intel dominance. Intel solution is not perfect that's clear but the talk is not fair for most part. Lot of people assume that while Intel is doomed due to X86 overhead, on the other side they are assuming that will be a piece of cake for ARM to catch up on things like floating point perfs and other things while still consuming less, be cheaper, etc.
I feel like once again people are underestimating Intel. Next year with medfield Intel may very well dominate the high end with chips powerfull enough to be a fit for anything from high end smart phones to net-books and tablets. Maybe I underestimate ARM and companies supporting their architectures but I think that as far as high end is concerned the gap between Intel and ARM will only grow at Intel advantage. I think manufacturers will have intensive to move to Intel offers sooner than a lot of people are expecting. In regard to software, how many of that ten thousands apps available on Iphone are worse it?
Back to Apple, they invest money in PA semi and Intrinsity, that's a lot of money but for Apple I read it's "only" a quarter of incomes and shifting to Intel (at least for tablets in next future) would not mean that their investments would be lost, Intel may securing the high end sooner than latter it's clear that they are years away from being able to compete in the lower segments. I know a lot will disagree but I don't think that Apple will accept to be at a perf disadvantage for too long for the sake of the 99.9% of showelwares out of 50 000 in the applestore.

That's the end of my rent I know most people with disagree but clearly ARM engineers must have a lot of pressure on their shoulder right now, and their "eagles" may better turn out as an astounding piece of tech.

 

[Exophase]

You mean the ISA they helped architect from the company they helped found!

Apple's involvement may have spun off ARM Ltd, but the ISA itself far predates this. Apple certainly did not help architect it.

 

[darkblu]

liolio, I admire you optimism about intel's next year foray into ARM territories ; )

Intel surely have the litho advantage, but that cannot be kept indefinitely. Intel may not be at the end of the x86 rope just yet, but they're steadily reaching it. Architectures that were designed for human friendliness (versus computational efficiency, etc) are a bit past their prime time, and Intel's effort to keep said architectures en vogue is costing them more and more (it already cost them the smartphone market).

So I'm not so sure which hypothetic scenario could occur sooner - Apple going Intel on the idevices, or Intel dropping x86 from the handheld segment.

 

[Kurt]

Well they'd look silly ... which is not a big deal, but regardless I don't think they will do a 360 on the netbook issue.

But I thought 360 meant no change in direction, so what you are saying is, they ARE going to do it? Or is this one of those 'I turned 360 and walked away' jokes? Sorry for being thick.

 

[liolio]

liolio, I admire you optimism about intel's next year foray into ARM territories ; )

I would put it the other way around I'm pessimistic for ARM

Intel surely have the litho advantage, but that cannot be kept indefinitely. Intel may not be at the end of the x86 rope just yet, but they're steadily reaching it. Architectures that were designed for human friendliness (versus computational efficiency, etc) are a bit past their prime time, and Intel's effort to keep said architectures en vogue is costing them more and more (it already cost them the smartphone market).

So I'm not so sure which hypothetic scenario could occur sooner - Apple going Intel on the idevices, or Intel dropping x86 from the handheld segment.

I think you're putting to much weight in the touted "X86 overhead of doom". ARM is the leader so Intel needs a competitive edge, being a match would have gotten them nowhere. They decide to go for greater performances a the cost of higher power consumption and they gave them-selves time to meet the power requirement of handled devices. If Morrestown is not just a paper dragon it looks like there are already/almost there. Power consumption would be acceptable for a high end smart and perfs are better than anything else. Till they don't have enough of a competitive edge, cost is against them form factor is another issue. The thing that impresses me is that they get there using their 45nm process not their newest. It really spells trouble for ARM derivatives as "medfield" will be there next year. I've tough time believing that we will see 28nm ARM parts for most part of 2011 no matter one goes with TSMC or GF.

One other thing in regard to the X86 overhead, I'm close to thinking that it's irrelevant/insignificant. Say Intel didn't need a competitive edge, do you really think that the gap in power consumption between atom and ARM CPUs would have been that big. Atom TDP was 2.5Watts if my memory serves right which is more than ARM counter but perfs are nothing close either. If Intel only wanted to match ARM perfs first Atom consumption could have been lower:
*remove the "high performance" FP unit, put a sucky but low power FP unit
*remove the "high performance" SIMD unit, same as above
*use narrower memory channel (as in the new ones)
*remove hyperthreading
*aim at lower clockspeed
*move to a shorter pipeline
Do you thing it would still consume 2.5Watt for the sake of X86 overhead? I don't think so, power consumption would be really close to ARM counter parts and one would realize that the pretended overhead is not really the problem. The problem is Intel can't go for parity imho ARM is king of the hill, that's the overhead they are facing now.

 

[MfA]

But I thought 360 meant no change in direction, so what you are saying is, they ARE going to do it? Or is this one of those 'I turned 360 and walked away' jokes? Sorry for being thick.

Ugh, thanks for ruining my day ... nothing like feeling like a moron early in the morning :/ Yeah, I meant 180.

 

[Simon F]

One possible benefit of the x86 ISA over the ARM (ignoring the Thumb ISA for the moment) is that it is probably a bit denser. The savings in bus bandwidth and cache efficiency might cancel out the increased decode complexity <shrug>

 

[darkblu]

I think you're putting to much weight in the touted "X86 overhead of doom".

That overhead is not just transistor-related, it's present on various levels - from architecture licensing (yes, you can finally design your own atoms now, but who'd want to?), to compiler backends (the reason some x86 compilers generate good code is the enormous amount of human effort poured into catering to that architecture), to a meaningless organization of the opcode space (i.e. without much, if any, relation to opcodes' use statistics).

ARM is the leader so Intel needs a competitive edge, being a match would have gotten them nowhere. They decide to go for greater performances a the cost of higher power consumption and they gave them-selves time to meet the power requirement of handled devices. If Morrestown is not just a paper dragon it looks like there are already/almost there. Power consumption would be acceptable for a high end smart and perfs are better than anything else. Till they don't have enough of a competitive edge, cost is against them form factor is another issue. The thing that impresses me is that they get there using their 45nm process not their newest. It really spells trouble for ARM derivatives as "medfield" will be there next year. I've tough time believing that we will see 28nm ARM parts for most part of 2011 no matter one goes with TSMC or GF.

Well, as we already discussed, lithography is Intel's main weapon in this battle.

One other thing in regard to the X86 overhead, I'm close to thinking that it's irrelevant/insignificant. Say Intel didn't need a competitive edge, do you really think that the gap in power consumption between atom and ARM CPUs would have been that big. Atom TDP was 2.5Watts if my memory serves right which is more than ARM counter but perfs are nothing close either. If Intel only wanted to match ARM perfs first Atom consumption could have been lower:
*remove the "high performance" FP unit, put a sucky but low power FP unit
*remove the "high performance" SIMD unit, same as above
*use narrower memory channel (as in the new ones)
*remove hyperthreading
*aim at lower clockspeed
*move to a shorter pipeline
Do you thing it would still consume 2.5Watt for the sake of X86 overhead? I don't think so, power consumption would be really close to ARM counter parts and one would realize that the pretended overhead is not really the problem. The problem is Intel can't go for parity imho ARM is king of the hill, that's the overhead they are facing now.

Intel spent those 2.5W for x86 binary compatibility - for the benefit or running code that has been once compiled for *that* SIMD and *that* FPU. And the result from that was as expected - Intel secured themselves the market for little windows machines (AKA netbooks) - nothing more, nothing less. Unfortunately, that gave them nothing from handheld markets.

Btw, your logic goes either way. Do you believe that if ARM did not focus so much on power draw they could not have come up with a 2.5W core of equal-or-better performance to atom? Hint: check out the new A9's ; )

IMHO, until Intel start producing equally watt-efficient designs at the same litho nodes as ARM lincensees, ARM are safe and sound. And I can't see Intel achieving that while sticking to the venerable x86. I'm not saying that from the position of a CPU designer (I'm not), but from the position of somebody who's been closely following the history of the architecture (my first asm code was for 8080).

One possible benefit of the x86 ISA over the ARM (ignoring the Thumb ISA for the moment) is that it is probably a bit denser. The savings in bus bandwidth and cache efficiency might cancel out the increased decode complexity <shrug>

That would have likely been the case *if* x86 was a modern CISC ISA designed from scratch with op use satistics in mind. We know that was not the case - the ISA was made following the model of historical tarball. When your opspace has a munch of 1-byte BCD arithmetic instructions (as AAA), while a CMOV for somethig as rudimentarty as r32->r32 (for a measly 8-reg file!) is 3 bytes, the density benefits form the ISA become questionable. And this is before we consider things like the architecture's encoding expressivness, e.g. 2-operand vs 3-operand encoding, etc. At the end of the day, IA-32 yields just a tad higher density than your vanilla RISC of choice, and gets easily beaten by narrow RISCs like Thumb, compiler's stupidity nonwithstanding.