Is Merrifield Intel's Bulldozer?

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Will Merrifield be DOA?

  • Yeah, it's too little, too late

  • No, it'll rock!

  • What the heck is a Merrifield?


Results are only viewable after voting.

lopri

Elite Member
Jul 27, 2002
13,209
594
126
I want merrifield to be successful, but the timeframe in which its coming out is way late. i don't think single-thread performance will be meaningfully higher than bay trail, z3770 specifically.
With all due respect, Z3770 is a press-only edition. Even the "press" didn't get a chance to fully examine it, iirc.
 

NTMBK

Lifer
Nov 14, 2011
10,208
4,940
136
With all due respect, Z3770 is a press-only edition. Even the "press" didn't get a chance to fully examine it, iirc.

The Z3770 is in the Dell Venue 11 Pro, for a start. :colbert: It's out there.
 

Homeles

Platinum Member
Dec 9, 2011
2,580
0
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It wasn't too long ago when the Anandtech hive mind pronouned Intel ultimate victors simply because of their process node advantage and their technical expertise. They would crush all, these people pronounced. I never bought that. Now we see the reverse situation, whereas Intel could do no wrong before now it cannot do anything right by the same people. Maybe these people need to re-examine their prophecies and ask themselves some hard questions.
Perhaps you should reexamine what those people were, and are prophsizing.
A mere 20% higher than Bay Trail's best would mean a roughly 2.9GHz clock speed. We're talking the same uarch here. Max clock will more likely be lower than higher. This is only regarding single thread performance, since the core count will also be halved. This isn't a successor to Bay Trail, this is the same generation fit into a lower power profile.
Yeah, I think it's unlikely that the core is changed at all, and as you've pointed out, the clocks should be lower. This still should not be a concern, though.
What's really going to make a big difference to me is if Cortex-A15 can really have its perf/W improved as much as nVidia advertizes, while still on TSMC 28HPM. And if Samsung can pull off anything similar. 2GHz at 1W is much better than what we've seen with Samsung and nVidia's SoCs thus far and goes a long way to narrow the gap with Intel. Cortex-A57 and 20nm should help further. Will also be interested to see what process node Exynos 6 is being made on.
Anything fabbed on Samsung 20nm should look really impressive compared to their 28nm counterparts. Gate first to gate last should be a nice improvement.

I feel like Intel missed the boat as far as capturing a lot of the smartphone market goes. Silvermont is great and all, but only in comparison to current generation SoCs. If new SoCs from Samsung, Nvidia and Qualcomm show up in a timely manner, Intel's going to miss out on a lot of business.

Which isn't a huge deal, really. They've done well with tablets thus far, and it's only going to get better as time goes on. They're also supposed to turn around pretty quick and launch Airmont based SoCs in Q3(?) or Q4, which is where Intel will really have a competitive advantage.

No matter what happens, as I've said before, the real winners here will be the consumers. Next year's SoCs are going to simply look incredible, no matter how you slice it. Nvidia stops slacking, Samsung gets serious, Apple's getting more serious, Intel shows up to the fight... yeah. I'm going to be getting a new phone next year. :)

I would love to get my hands on a Intel-powered Nexus device, if such a thing came into existence.
 

Exophase

Diamond Member
Apr 19, 2012
4,439
9
81
More along rumor territory is Samsung developing a GPU for their SoCs, and even that is supported by various presentations and whitepapers.