Lenovo 8" Thinkpad: serious stuff

[postmortemIA]

Better Screen, 20% faster processor (3770 vs 3740)

...and HDMI out, big thing for me.

 

[bearxor]

I love how the marketing for these tablets with Bay Trail are focusing on the highest turbo'd frequency per chip instead if the rated frequency. The 3740 is a 1.33ghz chip whereas the 3770 is a 1.46ghz chip. But they get marketed at 1.83ghz and 2.4ghz, the max turbo frequency, instead.

 

[lagokc]

...and HDMI out, big thing for me.

... and USB 3.0 instead of just 2.0.

 

[pw257008]

I love how the marketing for these tablets with Bay Trail are focusing on the highest turbo'd frequency per chip instead if the rated frequency. The 3740 is a 1.33ghz chip whereas the 3770 is a 1.46ghz chip. But they get marketed at 1.83ghz and 2.4ghz, the max turbo frequency, instead.

Are there any results out there on how often these hit their boost speeds? My laptop i5 seems to have little issue staying at its 2.9 boost speed if I want it to (eg BOINC). Temperatures rise, though, and I'd think this would only be exacerbated in a smaller form factor, and I don't know how Bay Trail treats boost vs. how Intel's mainline treats it.

 

[deathBOB]

If I only care about performance when I engage in a performance intensive task, turbo speeds seem more relevant than base clocks, especially when most tasks are single threaded.

 

[hans007]

Because you can't just snap your fingers together and have the OS you want (sadly). Needless to say, because of Windows 8's poor response, there's already been a regime change, so the OS everyone is asking for will no doubt arrive at some point.

basically what they needed to do was only put metro or whatever on tablets / phones and put a windows 7 style desktop only on desktops / laptops. i.e. the way apple more or less does it or any other sensible company.

not force the stupid tile start menu on everyone. i had a windows phone for a bit to play with and at least there it makes sense. on the desktop it is just terrible and confusing . some idiot product manager or many of them at microsoft and their associated yes men, gave up tons of functionality just to push this idiotic agenda. and thats why those people are all getting fired left and right.

the amount of time dev teams probably wasted at microsoft making the start menu and desktop switching etc they probably could have written and entirely different OS. windows 9 can't come soon enough.

 

[bearxor]

Idiotic in a world where tablets don't outsell PC's anyways.

Some of you guys are expecting just some massive reversal from Win 8 with Win 9. There will be change, for sure, but if you're expecting modern to go away, then you're all going to be very disappointed.

 

[Roland00Address]

I love how the marketing for these tablets with Bay Trail are focusing on the highest turbo'd frequency per chip instead if the rated frequency. The 3740 is a 1.33ghz chip whereas the 3770 is a 1.46ghz chip. But they get marketed at 1.83ghz and 2.4ghz, the max turbo frequency, instead.

2.394 ghz vs 1.862 ghz is a performance difference of 28.7% difference
1.463 ghz vs 1.330 ghz is a performance difference of 10.0% difference

In benchmarks the difference between the 3770 and the 3740 is closer to max turbo clocks and not the base clock. Numbers are anandtech testing of z3770 reference platform vs anadtech testing of asus t100.

Cinebench R11.5 Single Threaded (higher is better)
Z3770-.40 vs Z3740-.31 (29.0% difference)
Cinebench R11.5 Multi Threaded (higher is better)
Z3770-1.48 vs Z3740-1.24 (19.4% difference)
7-Zip Single Threaded Benchmark (higher is better)
Z3770-1655 vs Z3740-1323 (25.1% difference)
7-Zip Multi Threaded Benchmark (higher is better)
Z3770-5747 vs Z3740-4841 (18.7% difference)
PCMark7 2013 (higher is better)
Z3770-2602 vs Z3740-2328 (11.7% difference)
Mozilla Kraken Benchmark (lower is better)
Z3770-4599.3 vs Z3740-5745.4 (24.9% difference)
SunSpider 0.91 (lower is better)
Z3770-458.5 vs Z3740-569.6 (24.2% difference)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

A better questions is why even advertise ghz at all base or turbo?

 

[bearxor]

I never argued that there's not a significant difference. Simply that, in my experience, computers were advertised with their base clock speeds, not their turbo speeds and it was an interesting change in advertising for me.

Of course the 3770 is going to be faster, especially since most things you'd do on a tablet will be single threaded, letting the three cores shut down more often.

 

[Roland00Address]

I never argued that there's not a significant difference. Simply that, in my experience, computers were advertised with their base clock speeds, not their turbo speeds and it was an interesting change in advertising for me.

Of course the 3770 is going to be faster, especially since most things you'd do on a tablet will be single threaded, letting the three cores shut down more often.

ARM cores are advertised with their max turbo frequency as their speed, thus I assume it is because of this reason. Furthermore I don't complain for the turbo actually works with mobile, and you get a better idea of the true speed by looking at the turbo numbers and not the base clocks.

One difference though with atom vs arm, atom controls their turbo with hardware (with much faster and better switching), while arm controls their version of turbo with software. In fact this is how the benchmark cheating gate was discovered, people actually looked at the dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS for short) apks with hex editors and noticed that certain apps triggered turbos that were not normally available. If arm dedicated the die area (and the years of testing and ip) to their chips the oems wouldn't have to cheat, for the most common way of cheating with benchmark gate was automatically peg the cpu to the max turbo, instead of letting the soc sense the workload. With a hardware version of turbo you would get faster switching and thus you actually see turbo work in action with those fast benchmarks.

 

[bearxor]

ARM cores are advertised with their max turbo frequency as their speed, thus I assume it is because of this reason.

I think there's a pretty big difference between 'This is our max rated frequency' and 'This is our max rated frequency once we turn off three of the four CPU cores'.

 

[dagamer34]

I think there's a pretty big difference between 'This is our max rated frequency' and 'This is our max rated frequency once we turn off three of the four CPU cores'.

Err... Intel does the same thing. Turbo advertised is single core, not multi-core, but this is why I hate advertising. It masks the truth, whether good or bad.

 

[desura]

So my only problem with this tablet is that it does not have a full-sized USB port, but only one little mini-usb port.

Looks like not many 8 inch tablets have full-sized usb ports.

 

[Ravynmagi]

So my only problem with this tablet is that it does not have a full-sized USB port, but only one little mini-usb port.

Looks like not many 8 inch tablets have full-sized usb ports.

Do any?

 

[desura]

Do any?

Don't think so.

Hoped it had, since this is a "thinkpad tablet."

Otherwise, doesn't look much better than the Miix 2, which is a hundred cheaper.

I had considered selling my RT Surface to buy this one, but naw.

 

[Red Storm]

The Miix is too low end, specifically the resolution.

I will probably be getting one of these Thinkpads, it looks like a nice tablet.

Now I only wonder if it can run Starcraft 2...

 

[bearxor]

Err... Intel does the same thing. Turbo advertised is single core, not multi-core, but this is why I hate advertising. It masks the truth, whether good or bad.

Err... Yeah, that was the point. It's ARM chips that don't have a "Turbo Mode". They are power gated and each core can run at a clock speed independently of each other, but they can also run every core full speed if need be. It's Intel that has to turn cores off in order to hit that magic 1.83 or 2.4 number.

 

[Ravynmagi]

The Miix is too low end, specifically the resolution.

I will probably be getting one of these Thinkpads, it looks like a nice tablet.

Now I only wonder if it can run Starcraft 2...

With Windows tablets, low DPI isn't all that bad. Because Windows is so poor at DPI scaling. And the problems are just limited to the desktop apps, even Modern IE 11 has DPI scaling problems.

Of course I'd still want the 1080p display. But the 1280x800 isn't quite as bad as it would be on an Android tablet.

 

[Roland00Address]

I think there's a pretty big difference between 'This is our max rated frequency' and 'This is our max rated frequency once we turn off three of the four CPU cores'.

Err... Yeah, that was the point. It's ARM chips that don't have a "Turbo Mode". They are power gated and each core can run at a clock speed independently of each other, but they can also run every core full speed if need be. It's Intel that has to turn cores off in order to hit that magic 1.83 or 2.4 number.

You do know that the turbo in the atom line and the core line are not the same right? They even have different names.

Atom calls their turbo, turbo burst.
Core calls their turbo, turbo boost.

Unfortunately intel has been completely tight lipped about how turbo burst operates while they have been very forthcoming about how turbo boost operates. For example intel publish pdfs telling you on the core line exactly how many bins each processor is capable of turboing for how many cores for example the i7 4700mq (2.4 ghz) can turbo 8 bins (3.2 ghz) as a quad or tri core, 9 bins (3.3 ghz) as a dual core, or 10 bins (3.4 ghz) as a single core.

To my understanding (I can't prove this, so if I am wrong I apologize) turbo burst is possible to turbo on all 4 cores at once, for short periods of time. One thing I do know is that with turbo burst the oem is completely capable of writing the governor of the turbo while an oem has far less control over the cpu with the core line of cpus.

I wish anand would go into detail what is the difference between the turbo with atom and core, but this is hard to do if intel won't volunteer the information.

 

[desura]

The Miix is too low end, specifically the resolution.

I will probably be getting one of these Thinkpads, it looks like a nice tablet.

Now I only wonder if it can run Starcraft 2...

The lack of a full-size USB port is really disappointing though. Like, once you have a full-size USB port in a tablet, it really shows you how awesome it can be...yeah, there's an adapter...but I still wish they'd managed to fit one in.

I needed an excuse to wait until next year anyways.

 

[Red Storm]

The lack of a full-size USB port is really disappointing though. Like, once you have a full-size USB port in a tablet, it really shows you how awesome it can be...yeah, there's an adapter...but I still wish they'd managed to fit one in.

I needed an excuse to wait until next year anyways.

I don't see any 8" tablet getting a full size USB port...