Intel's Game Changer: One Size Fits All Haswell

hothardware.com ^ | Monday, September 17, 2012 - | Joel Hruska

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Intel's next-generation CPU, codenamed Haswell, was the major star of IDF. One aspect of the chip we haven't talked about at length, however, is its emphasis on reduced power consumption. When Intel announced that its Ivy Bridge mobile products would target 17W for mainstream systems, it made headlines. Pushing Haswell down to 10W is an even greater achievement, but hitting these targets requires a great deal of collaboration and cooperation.

Intel's Dadi Perlmutter, Executive Vice President, Architecture Group with Xeon Phi and Atom CPUs

For most of the past 40 years, power consumption was treated as an afterthought at virtually every level. Unless you were building specialized hardware for particular operating environments, it made little sense to invest in clock-gating or other power conservation technology. Moore's law and Dennard scaling regularly delivered better transistor processes that leaked less and scaled more efficiently without requiring any particular effort on the engineers' part.

Thermal images are of Clover Trail, Intel's 32nm SoC

That trend came to a decisive halt at the 90nm process node back in 2005. Intel had already begun to develop technologies to lower CPU power consumption by that point; the company's SpeedStep technology had debuted several years earlier. Haswell continues this work, offering fine-grained control over areas of logic that were previously either on or off, up to and including specific execution units.

Haswell and Clover Trail have implemented new sleep states that deactivate even more logic areas

These optimizations are impressive in and of themselves, particularly the fact that idle CPU power is approaching tablet levels, but they're only part of the story. Operating system changes matter as well, and Intel has teamed up with Microsoft to ensure that Windows 8 takes full advantage of current and future hardware.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

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[ShadowAce]

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

And Semi-Accurate has an interesting article:

An update on Apple moving away from Intel

Major trends are happening........

And Anandtech article shows Apple now designing its own chip:

Can't seem to find it now...may have been pulled.

[Bobalu]

10 watts is amazing! This means massive power savings for server farms. :-)

I’m constantly and pleasantly surprised by new low-power processors. I can create devices now that operate for the shelf-life of their batteries!

For example this is from the data sheet of a new ARM Cortex M4 from Atmel. This is a very low cost device.

-Active mode downto 90µA/MHz
-Full RAM and Logic Retention mode downto1.5µA with fast wake-up time (<1.5µs)
-Ultra low power Backup mode with/without RTC downto 0.9/0.5µA

I no longer bother putting an off switch on anything, there is no point to it. I just leave the processor running in a low-power mode and let it watch for events like a keypress or incoming data.

My boards are very sleepy...they are asleep (with one eye open) almost all the time.

[backwoods-engineer]

Intel keeping up with ARM, who have had clock gating and other power-management features even back to ARMV3.

[backwoods-engineer]

I’m designing in an ARM Cortex-M4 into an audio system right now. It is an amazing chip. A 32-bit microcontroller with floating point for under $3 in quantity. Stunning.

[Bobalu]

I adore your handle... Backwoods-engineer...it’s very good :-)

I’m certain we have much in common.....

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

here we go:

Chip strip reveals 'handmade' Apple A6

[Marine_Uncle]

I’ll bet anyone that there are more transistors in that chip then pop corn kernels in my dish.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Maybe they will tell us someday.

[antiRepublicrat]

This is a good one to remember for the next inevitable “Apple just packages standard stuff in shiny cases” post.

Not only is it hand laid-out, but Samsung and most others do what Apple has been doing, which is take essentially off the shelf licensed components (ARM core, ARM SIMD unit, PowerVR or nVIDIA GPU, etc.) and put them on a die. There is room for optimization and differentiation, but it’s still using standard components that all had access to.

Then Apple buys a rare license from ARM to create their OWN cores based on the ARM architecture which, BTW, Apple helped create in the first place. This is a unique chip on the market that nobody else can equal by assembling the same components on a die (remember, an Apple A4 was just a slightly modified Samsung Hummingbird, with approximate performance). Looks like they also incorporated elements of the Cortex A15 (40% faster than A9, all else equal) into the A6 too, which would probably make it the first A15 tech to hit the mass market. I was wondering how they got a 100% CPU speed improvement with only a 50% bump in clock and still two cores, and this is how they did it.

To me, much of the iPhone 5 is okay, but not exactly exiting. But this is hard core geek stuff, cool. This is where that half-billion dollar chip designer buying spree pays off.