Anybody Remember Conroe?

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Bradtech519

Senior member
Jul 6, 2010
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Had an E6850 and loved it. Wiped the floor with the X2 3800+ overclocked. It shows what happens when you wake a sleeping giant like Intel.
 

PPB

Golden Member
Jul 5, 2013
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Well, since this thread is based just in wishful thinking, it pretty much ends up to wether you "feel" the same "vibe" as conroe's pre-release.


I personally, dont. Honestly there isnt much to discuss as the technical POV was totally disregarded in the very first post of the thread. Seems like silvermont will be a nice step up from Atom. The problem is when you start to account that a 2013 product will have good gains IPC wise against a 2008 architecture.

I think Jaguar pretty much summed up that if Intel would have went this route 4 years before, and this Silvermont (architectural wise) would have been a 2009 to 2010 release, Intel would probably be a stablished competitor in the mobile space today. This leaves me to think that Intel lately has become too dependant in his process advantage, only trying to penetrate that market on a already mature 22nm node and just 1 year from 14nm.

Also, the desperation in downscalling their big cores (IB/HSW) into tablet form factors and trying with Silvermont at the same time is nothing but mixed signals to me. I think the big cores should not scale beyond ultrabook/ULV factor and leave the tablet/smartphone to the Atom product line.
 

Sweepr

Diamond Member
May 12, 2006
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First of all, Kabini appears to just have an arbitrary 15W catch-all TDP thrown at it. Anand found it to consume much less.

Kabini has nothing to do with this thread, but now that you mentioned it... Anand also shows a Kabini notebook barely matching an IB ULV notebook in light workloads with normalized battery life and up to 18% more battery life under high CPU usage. Battery life should be much better for the kind of CPU/GPU performance it offers (Haswell ULT Macbook Air 2013 has 35-65% more battery life - normalized battery capacity - than IB ULV Air 2012). If we assume Bay Trail is even more agressive than Haswell on the power front you kinda get where some of this hype comes from.

AnandTech said:
The CPU performance testing of x264 HD 5.x and Cinebench confirm the CPU deficit AMD faces with Kabini. In heavily threaded workloads, Ivy Bridge ULV is 50-100% faster, but the real problem is in the single-threaded workloads. A single Jaguar core in Cinebench manages to score just 0.39 compared to IVB ULV’s score of 1.24, so worst-case Kabini is one third the speed of Ivy Bridge.
 

Khato

Golden Member
Jul 15, 2001
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Your slides are outdated , yet you keep using them as if the info
written is holy grail..

From the forum :
http://wenku.baidu.com/view/678a3a36dd36a32d73758148.html
4.5W is the minimum , at 1.46ghz and for a 2C.
True, the slides are outdated as we have more accurate information now. But the slides are still technically correct. 4.5W is in the 4-6.5W range while 7.5W is in the <= 10W category. So all the more accurate current information tells us is that Intel is coming in on the low end of their projections for Baytrail M.

Not particularly, it's about where I expected it to be. Why is that when I'd previously stated my expectation that the Snapdragon 800 MDP was probably using somewhere between 6 and 7 watts to provide that level of performance? Simple - take a look at the actual Playwares Review of the Samsung S4 LTE-A which shows GLBenchmark 2.7.2 performance under half that of the MDP. Such most likely means that the GPU was run at half the frequency of the MDP with lower voltage as well, probably resulting in around 1.5W of power usage.
 

iAMunderDog

Junior Member
Jul 5, 2013
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Kabini has nothing to do with this thread, but now that you mentioned it... Anand also shows a Kabini notebook barely matching an IB ULV notebook in light workloads with normalized battery life and up to 18% more battery life under high CPU usage. Battery life should be much better for the kind of CPU/GPU performance it offers (Haswell ULT Macbook Air 2013 has 35-65% more battery life - normalized battery capacity - than IB ULV Air 2012). If we assume Bay Trail is even more agressive than Haswell on the power front you kinda get where some of this hype comes from.

It all depends on capacity of the battery, Haswell in most cases has much improved idle over Ivy Bridge and some other things. On the paper, Haswell could be better but most people don't count all the factors thus the people get the wrong image.
 

blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
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It all depends on capacity of the battery, Haswell in most cases has much improved idle over Ivy Bridge and some other things. On the paper, Haswell could be better but most people don't count all the factors thus the people get the wrong image.

You're really not giving intel enough credit here, the MBA isn't getting double the battery life (over IVB) merely by virtue of a larger battery. Some of the external factors (OS power management, battery size, etc) can be manipulated to improve things slightly, but the Haswell ULV is just that much better than Ivy Bridge in terms of battery life IMO. Many review websites have tested battery life to be 12-13 hours on the MBA. Anyway, intel has implemented many of the same burst and power management schemes into Silvermont that Haswell uses, and I think the Silvermont will be equally impressive in that respect. Of course, we won't know for sure until next month...it should be interesting in any case.
 
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Aug 11, 2008
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Personally, from that "Bay Trail crushes ARM" thread and this thread that seems to be a direct consequence of that, I have no strong feelings either way - I won't be surprised if the new Atom outperforms any ARM competitor, but I can't say I'm exactly hoping or counting on it either. I'm just purely wait-and-see, no expectations either way.

My only real opinion on the matter is that whether Bay Trail outperforms ARM or not, AnTuTu is, without a doubt in my mind, not the benchmark to indicate it. AnTuTu is neither reliable nor consistent, and can be gamed. Its technical flaws prevent it from being any sort of bell-weather. And that's the crux of the issue. Had there been multiple benchmarks made public - Kraken, Octane, Browsermark, 3DMark, Sunspider, anything at all aside from AnTuTu, then that would be a more solid base upon which to shout "Woohoo, Intel finally beat ARM! My company is number 1 and I am somehow a better person for it! Take that, you ARM fanboys!".

So the real issue at heart here (for me) isn't whether people believe or don't believe that Intel can catch/overtake ARM. (Everything is just a matter of money in engineering - how much one party decides to throw at the problem - so anything is possible*, and I believe Intel should in fact allocate as much resources as they need in order to succeed here, even to the detriment of their desktop line.) The real issue at heart is that only one benchmark has been "leaked", and it is the worst possible benchmark, and yet some decidedly pro-Intel parties take it as irrefutable evidence already. And then, when it is pointed out to them that AnTuTu is a terri-bad benchmark, so hold off on the proclamation until we get more reliable and consistent benchmarks, these same pro-Intel parties brand their opponents "AMD fans", "ARM fans", "Qualcomm fans", or just generic "Intel haters". I find that rather disturbing. You, OP, do not wish to be branded an Intel fanboy (even going so far as to explain the nickname with a completely harmless origin story), yet you seem to have no qualms about branding the people who disagree with your conclusions and/or interpretations to be Intel haters. It is very disconcerting, and I seriously hope you can begin discussions in the future without unnecessary rhetoric like that. You essentially invited a fanboy flamewar to happen when you opened your thread like that. If that truly wasn't your intent, then you may be well served by exercising better judgment in your future opening posts.

TL;DR: I've no doubt in my mind that if Intel actually spent several billions in the design of Bay Trail with the express intent of overthrowing ARM, it is very probable to overtake ARM in performance and efficiency. However, the question of whether they have now accomplished it completely, partially, or not at all, is not something that the AnTuTu benchmark can determine.



*Engineering results scale pretty well with money. If Apple, for example, handed AMD $50B to build the necessary fab and tools and design a chip to embarrass the highest-end Intel products, it would happen (that's a lot of money). But if Google would then hand Intel a bigger amount of money to one-up that resulting Apple/AMD product, then it would also happen. It really all comes down to money, hence the more successful a company becomes, the more muscle they have to flex since engineering issues are mostly caused by - and also mitigated/cured by - money.

Are you honestly trying to tell me that these forums are not rife with posts from amd fans doing exactly the same thing, sometimes basing their claims on nothing more than marketing slides or statements by persons with a vested interest in the product they are making claims for? It is really sad actually to see the forums so polarized that it seems sometimes impossible to get any useful information at all.
 

blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
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Are you honestly trying to tell me that these forums are not rife with posts from amd fans doing exactly the same thing, sometimes basing their claims on nothing more than marketing slides or statements by persons with a vested interest in the product they are making claims for? It is really sad actually to see the forums so polarized that it seems sometimes impossible to get any useful information at all.

I don't see the big deal, really. It's aggravating to see fans of a certain company waving their banner - I feel the same way, but keep in mind that a lot of people tend to turn a blind eye when the same is done with the heavily favored company (eg intel). It seems like a lot of folks have a double standard. It's okay to wave a banner for company A but not for company B.

I realize it's annoying to see the outrageous claims and what not, but if they're trolling, spamming or being intentionally misleading you can always report them.
 

Abwx

Lifer
Apr 2, 2011
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You're really not giving intel enough credit here, the MBA isn't getting double the battery life (over IVB) merely by virtue of a larger battery. Some of the external factors (OS power management, battery size, etc) can be manipulated to improve things slightly, but the Haswell ULV is just that much better than Ivy Bridge in terms of battery life IMO. Many review websites have tested battery life to be 12-13 hours on the MBA. Anyway, intel has implemented many of the same burst and power management schemes into Silvermont that Haswell uses, and I think the Silvermont will be equally impressive in that respect. Of course, we won't know for sure until next month...it should be interesting in any case.

How much the battery capacity , according to Anand s review.?.

And why not the slightest power compsumption measurement ,
not only Anand , btw..
 

Idontcare

Elite Member
Oct 10, 1999
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Most of the problem here stems from the fact that mobile benchmarking is, to put it as kindly as I can, in the dark ages. This is especially true if you're trying to figure out how the CPU performs (as opposed to graphics). At least with graphics benchmarks, a real image is produced for the run. For most of the CPU benchmarks, it's a random snippet of code compiled in an undocumented way that produces an unknown result. That result is then turned into a score and published.

There are so many different mobile CPU architectures (A7, A8, A9, A15, Krait2, Krait3, Swift, etc) that run at so many different claimed frequencies, yet sit on so many different form factors that produce different throttling behaviors that it's almost impossible to do an apples to apples comparison. Then you have things like different OS types (Android, IOS, Win8) with so many different versions... it's all a mess.

Something like Geekbench tries to close that gap, but again, that's another closed source benchmark with an unknown workload with unknown compiler settings. Has anybody like Exophase done a breakdown to see what instructions are used? For example, do the FP components use SSE and NEON across architectures and OS versions?

Then there are the browser benchmarks (Sunspider, Octane, Kraken, etc). Nobody ever believes these are right. There are always claims of browser cheats or unfair optimization. Other people say that the benchmarks "don't run long enough" and that if they were longer, this would lead to more throttling.

Does anybody here have a mobile benchmark that they think is a reasonable indication of CPU performance? Is there any "one" benchmark that could leak that people would actually believe? I don't think there is, and honestly, there shouldn't be.

Until someone steps up and produces a better mobile benchmark, I'm afraid that the screams and yells of the forum posters will continue unabated.

Welcome to the forums SlimFan, and that is a great post too!
 

bryanW1995

Lifer
May 22, 2007
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Exactly. even if you adjust the slides and say performance is only 1.5x better and power is only 2x lower it's still pretty good. I mean if it performs even worse than those "halved numbers", it's a lot bigger Marketing failure than JF-AMD with BD.

I don't know that it's possible to do worse than JF-AMD. Many of us had become resigned to buying intel cpu's going forward, but his fantasy-land assertions just made the actual pain of watching BD suck that much worse.
 

jhu

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
11,918
9
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Most of the problem here stems from the fact that mobile benchmarking is, to put it as kindly as I can, in the dark ages. This is especially true if you're trying to figure out how the CPU performs (as opposed to graphics). At least with graphics benchmarks, a real image is produced for the run. For most of the CPU benchmarks, it's a random snippet of code compiled in an undocumented way that produces an unknown result. That result is then turned into a score and published.

There are so many different mobile CPU architectures (A7, A8, A9, A15, Krait2, Krait3, Swift, etc) that run at so many different claimed frequencies, yet sit on so many different form factors that produce different throttling behaviors that it's almost impossible to do an apples to apples comparison. Then you have things like different OS types (Android, IOS, Win8) with so many different versions... it's all a mess.

Something like Geekbench tries to close that gap, but again, that's another closed source benchmark with an unknown workload with unknown compiler settings. Has anybody like Exophase done a breakdown to see what instructions are used? For example, do the FP components use SSE and NEON across architectures and OS versions?

Then there are the browser benchmarks (Sunspider, Octane, Kraken, etc). Nobody ever believes these are right. There are always claims of browser cheats or unfair optimization. Other people say that the benchmarks "don't run long enough" and that if they were longer, this would lead to more throttling.

Does anybody here have a mobile benchmark that they think is a reasonable indication of CPU performance? Is there any "one" benchmark that could leak that people would actually believe? I don't think there is, and honestly, there shouldn't be.

Until someone steps up and produces a better mobile benchmark, I'm afraid that the screams and yells of the forum posters will continue unabated.

I rooted whatever ARM devices I had, put Debian on them, compiled Povray 3.6 on them, and ran the benchmark scene. NEON vs. VFPU didn't make much difference due to the code itself.
 

dealcorn

Senior member
May 28, 2011
247
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In olden days, efficiency or performance per watt was the undisputed predictive metric in the mobile space for media consumption devices. Anandtech was reasonably good at measuring things like idle or 1080p power requirements so comparisons across vendors was easy and credible. The emergence of Intel as a leader by that metric requires a reinvention of the world.
 

SiliconWars

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2012
2,346
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Kabini has nothing to do with this thread, but now that you mentioned it... Anand also shows a Kabini notebook barely matching an IB ULV notebook in light workloads with normalized battery life and up to 18% more battery life under high CPU usage. Battery life should be much better for the kind of CPU/GPU performance it offers (Haswell ULT Macbook Air 2013 has 35-65% more battery life - normalized battery capacity - than IB ULV Air 2012). If we assume Bay Trail is even more agressive than Haswell on the power front you kinda get where some of this hype comes from.

As I mentioned in another thread, you can't compare notebooks to get the real performance and power draw of the chips. Intel has rules for ensuring only the best, power-sipping components are used in their boutique ultrabook reviews. The rest of them are the usual crap with much worse battery life.
 

blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
8,548
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As I mentioned in another thread, you can't compare notebooks to get the real performance and power draw of the chips. Intel has rules for ensuring only the best, power-sipping components are used in their boutique ultrabook reviews. The rest of them are the usual crap with much worse battery life.

Since when has intel dictated to manufactures what silicon / products they are able to send out for reviews.....so what you're essentially stating is, intel tells Apple, samsung, asus, etc which chips and components they can use in their review samples.

Sorry, but no.
 

SiliconWars

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2012
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Since when has intel dictated to manufactures what silicon / products they are able to send out for reviews.....so what you're essentially stating is, intel tells Apple, samsung, asus, etc which chips and components they can use in their review samples.

Sorry, but no.

Yes that's what I'm saying, but don't take my word for it.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6529/busting-the-x86-power-myth-indepth-clover-trail-power-analysis

Intel's role in the industry has started to change. It worked very closely with Acer on bringing the W510, W700 and S7 to market. With Haswell, Intel will work even closer with its partners - going as far as to specify other, non-Intel components on the motherboard in pursuit of ultimate battery life.
 

SiliconWars

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2012
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Just to clarify - I'm not saying that review samples are of higher quality than retail samples of the same notebook. What I'm saying is that the high-end notebooks and ultrabooks that you see reviewed on Anandtech have far better power draw compared to lower end models because Intel makes sure that only the most power frugal components are used on high-end models.

This is why there is so much variation between laptops and ultrabooks with the same Intel CPU in them. It's not Anandtech's fault btw - they only get sent high-end stuff for reviewing, but it gives a false impression of how the CPU (and often the HD graphics) performs in a bog-standard ultrabook design.
 

Sweepr

Diamond Member
May 12, 2006
5,148
1,143
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As I mentioned in another thread, you can't compare notebooks to get the real performance and power draw of the chips. Intel has rules for ensuring only the best, power-sipping components are used in their boutique ultrabook reviews. The rest of them are the usual crap with much worse battery life.

They used a Dell XPS 12 for the IB ULV vs Kabini comparison. Your argument actually makes sense, maybe retail Kabini-based laptops have lower battery life than the AMD prototype provided to Anand for testing purposes.

AnandTech Kabini Review said:
AMD shipped hardware sites special prototype laptops, similar to what we&#8217;ve seen in the past with Sandy Bridge, Llano, Ivy Bridge, and Trinity. These systems typically aren&#8217;t intended to hit retail outlets, though in some cases they may be very similar to production laptops;
 

SlimFan

Member
Jul 5, 2013
92
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I rooted whatever ARM devices I had, put Debian on them, compiled Povray 3.6 on them, and ran the benchmark scene. NEON vs. VFPU didn't make much difference due to the code itself.

That looks like great data! It's unfortunate that you had to root devices in order to create the table. Povray isn't exactly the typical phone workload, so how well it applies to a phone/tablet workload is hard to say (although Linus seems to say over at RWT that it doesn't apply at all, FWIW).

If we take Intel's claims of IPC gains at face value, then that would put Silvermont a little above a Pentium III in terms of IPC for this particular workload (scaling the 18pps up to 27pps with the 1.5x scale). That's higher than the other ARM CPUs listed, but if I understand the list, there aren't any of the newer ARM compatible cores on there.

These results were also compiled for the target machine each time. That's not typically done with shrink-wrapped software. However, in the embedded world, that's much more feasible. If Android, etc., are all platforms that are custom built for each device, does that mean it makes something like a custom compiler a more "fair" thing to use? If ARM partners use ARM's own compiler (or their own!) to build the default browser for a particular device, and that yields an additional 10% boost on some benchmarks, is that fair game? Does an embedded world make ICC results more relevant? It's not like Intel can use ICC to "cripple ARM" like they've been accused of doing to AMD, since it doesn't generate ARM binaries at all.

And thanks for the kind words, IDC.
 
Mar 10, 2006
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As I mentioned in another thread, you can't compare notebooks to get the real performance and power draw of the chips. Intel has rules for ensuring only the best, power-sipping components are used in their boutique ultrabook reviews. The rest of them are the usual crap with much worse battery life.

SiliconWars,

You do realize that the same type of design optimization happens with phones and tablets, right, and that Ultrabooks are now just becoming more like those devices in terms of design process?
 

SiliconWars

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2012
2,346
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SiliconWars,

You do realize that the same type of design optimization happens with phones and tablets, right, and that Ultrabooks are now just becoming more like those devices in terms of design process?

It doesn't matter. The point is that you can't make a declaration of SoC power draw based on such obvious discrepancies between the systems elsewhere.

We may only be talking about a few Watts, but a few Watts at such low TDP's is a huge difference. Fact is AMD doesn't have the same clout with OEM's and they can never get a fair crack at it when the actual systems are so heavily biased in favour of Intel.

Stick a 15W Kabini and 15W ULV Haswell in the exact same chassis and you'd be amazed at how much better battery life the Kabini had.
 

blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
8,548
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Intel's role in the industry has started to change. It worked very closely with Acer on bringing the W510, W700 and S7 to market. With Haswell, Intel will work even closer with its partners - going as far as to specify other, non-Intel components on the motherboard in pursuit of ultimate battery life.

I don't see anything here stating that intel is intentionally trying to mislead and manipulate reviewers. Of course intel has full control over the ultrabook specification, therefore they can specify various components to use for any manufacturer releasing a product using a form factor that they (intel) created. That's not surprising. I think the more likely scenario is that intel is trying to create a user experience which is somewhat even across various products -- they want all of the products released under their ultrabook spec to have good battery life. That means OEMs can't use cheap components which may compromise that. That does not, however, mean that intel is trying to mislead reviews and/or strongarm OEMs. I highly doubt that many would play along, especially Apple.

It is not uncommon within the silicon industry for a producer to set standards by which products are released. In the dGPU world, nvidia and AMD do the same thing - they both want even consumer experiences across a broad range of products; that doesn't mean reviewers are being misled.
 
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SiliconWars

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2012
2,346
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I don't see anything here stating that intel is intentionally trying to mislead and manipulate reviewers.

I didn't say that.

Of course intel has full control over the ultrabook specification, therefore they can specify various components to use for any manufacture producing a form factor that they created. That's not surprising.
Surprising or not, it gives them an advantage that you and others are unfairly attributing solely to Haswell. It's not, fact is Intel has the whole ecosystem behind them where it matters, ie on Anandtech reviews of high-end hardware.

I think the more likely scenario is that intel is trying to create a user experience which is somewhat even across various products -- they want all of the products released under their ultrabook spec to have good battery life. That means OEMs can't use cheap components which may compromise that. That does not, however, mean that intel is trying to mislead reviews and/or strongarm OEMs. I highly doubt that many would play along, especially Apple.

Yeah God forbid anyone suggests Apple tries to get an unfair advantage. As if they would.

It is not common within the silicon industry for a producer to set standards by which products are released. In the dGPU world, nvidia and AMD do the same thing - they both want even consumer experiences across a broad range of products; that doesn't mean reviewers are being misled.
The reviewers know exactly what is going on, it's the readership who are sadly ignorant of it. Anand spells these things out to you frequently under difficult reviewing circumstances, but you are far too busy cheerleading your favourite vendor to notice it.