Showing posts with label core. Show all posts
Showing posts with label core. Show all posts
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Intel Launches Core M Processors for Ultralight Tablets 2 in 1s
Intel has finally discussed details of its much-anticipated new Core M lineup of processors, which appear inside many of the thin-and-light products unveiled at this years IFA show. First unveiled by company President Renee James on stage during herComputex 2014 keynote address, Core M will be the first shipping processors designed and built on Intels new, shrunken 14nm fabrication process.
The first of the "Broadwell" family, now known as fifth-generation Core, is an especially small processor designed to run without a fan, enabling thinner and lighter devices without having to step down to the level of current low-power Atom processors. The "Llama Mountain" prototype Intel showed off at Computex was just 7.2mm thin, and the Asus Transformer Book Chi announced at the same time will be 7.3mm thin.
Another promise is vastly improved battery life. The 14nm lithography combined with Intels specific optimisations and architectural improvements should result in up to two hours more power on each charge cycle.
Three models of the Core M will be available: the 5Y70, 5Y10 and 5Y10a. All are dual-core processors with Hyper-Threading, and have integrated Intel HD 5300 graphics with 4MB L3 caches. While the 5Y70 has a 1.1GHz base frequency and can reach up to 2.6GHz with one or both cores, the 5Y10 models are clocked at 800MHz and can touch up to 2GHz. The 5Y10a and 5Y10 are identical other than the fact that the latter SKU is described as a "4W config down unit" which can presumably consume even less power. The 5Y70 also supports Intels vPro feature set for business-oriented products.
Core M is a new product category for Intel that will sit alongside the existing Core i3, i5 and i7 and is specifically designed for fanless ultraportable devices. While "2-in-1" tablets with detachable keyboards are the primary use case scenario, the company expects that manufacturers will use it in a variety of designs including more traditional notebooks.
Intel claims up to 50 percent better CPU performance and 40 percent better graphics performance than the previous generation ultra-low-power Core CPUs. Thermal Design Power (TDP), or the amount of heat dissipated by the processor, is reduced by 60 percent.
The integrated graphics component, which will be called Intel HD Graphics 5300, supports DirectX 11.2 and can power a 4K (3840x2160 pixels, 24Hz) screen. QuickSync video promises accelerated video editing and transcoding, while 1080p and 4K video playback should not impact battery life as much. Intel suggests that you can get 1.7 hours more playback time compared to a device based on the previous-generation Core i5-4302Y processor operating in the same 4.5W thermal envelope.
Intel says over 20 products based on Core M are on the way, including the Asus Transformer T300 Chi and Zenbook UX305, the Dell Latitude 13 7000, HP Envy x2, Acer Aspire Switch 12, and Lenovo ThinkPad Helix.
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
CES 2014 NVIDIA Introduces Tegra K1 SoC 64 bit Denver CPU and 192 core Kepler GPU
The Tegra line has always seemed like a second-thought product for NVIDIA due to lack of the innovation weve come to expect from NVIDIA. Well, this may be because they were busy working on something extraordinary, and its finally here. NVIDIAs latest addition to the Tegra line, the Tegra K1, was announced today at its CES 2014 event, and its pretty impressive. Tegra K1 brings NVIDIAs custom CPU core named Denver as well as a GPU built on the Kepler architecture, which according to NVIDIA can even outperform the Xbox 360 and the PS3 and DX11 compatibility, all the while keeping a 5W TDP. The PowerVR GPUs Apple always uses in its SoCs were always the pinnacle of mobile GPU performance, but if NVIDIAs performance claims about Tegra K1 pan out, Apples GPUs will be utterly blown out of the water.
Tegra K1 is, just like the Tegra 4, built on a 28nm process, which is pretty much the standard for modern SoCs, save for Intels latest Atoms, which have already moved to 22nm. Hopefully the efficient 28nm process will keep the TDP at 5W or below, despite that beefy Kepler GPU.
NVIDIAs latest SoC will actually come out in two variants. One will have a Quad-core Cortex-A15 CPU with a 2.3GHz clock speed and the other, which will only be available later this year, will feature a dual-core configuration of NVIDIAs own Denver CPU core. 2.3GHz is actually the highest clock speed weve ever seen a Cortex-A15 run on, so performance should be superb. The dual-core Denver-toting variant has an unknown clock speed, but whats really important is that Denver is a) NVIDIAs first custom ARM CPU and b) one of the first CPUs that use the ARMv8 architecture and therefore support 64-bit processing. Im very excited to see how Denver performs when it comes out, and the Quad-core Cortex-A15 @ 2.3GHz will be very impressive too. Also, NVIDIA says Tegra K1 will, like its predecessors, use the 4-PLUS-1 architecture, so theres going to be a single "shadow" CPU core for handling light tasks while using very little power. Whether its going to be used with both the Quad-core A15s and the Dual-core Denvers, I dont know, but I suspect the dual-core Denver wont need the extra shadow core.
Perhaps the most interesting GPU weve ever seen on mobile is the Tegra K1s GPU. Considering how every previous Tegra GPU was based on a very old architecture and seldom topped benchmark charts, a jump to Kepler in one generation is quite satisfying. NVIDIAs Kepler GPU architecture was introduced last year and brought high performance and much better power efficiency to notebook and desktop GPUs, and even supercomputers, but NVIDIA has now achieved the impressive feat of bringing this architecture to the ultra-mobile space. The Tegra K1s GPU uses one full Kepler SMX, which is 192 unified shader units (or as NVIDIA calls it, cores). Thats much more shading units that any mobile GPU has ever packed (for instance, Apples A7s GPU had 128 shader units). NVIDIA claims that this GPU can even outperform both the Xbox 360 and the PS3. According to our calculations, it can, at 950MHz at least. At this clock speed, this GPU would have 365 GFLOPS of power, which is much more than the Xbox 360s 240 GFLOPS GPU and the PS3s 230 GFLOPS. I dont know whether NVIDIAs 5W TDP claim account for the GPU at 950MHz, but if it does (and it might, given how power efficient Kepler is), I pity NVIDIAs SoC competitors. For the record, to match the Xbox 360s performance, the Tegra K1s GPU would have to be clocked at 625MHz, which is actually lower than the Tegra 4s GPU clock. At the rather standard GPU clock speed for many mobile GPUs, 500MHz, the Tegra K1 can achieve 192 GFLOPS of peak theoretical performance, which is more than all of its competitors have reached. Of course, there are theoretical calculations, and well have to wait for a device running the Tegra K1 to be released to test whether its performance (vs its power consumption) is as good as it sounds.
The Tegra K1 GPU also touts DirectX 11 compatibility, and will probably also support OpenGL ES 3.0. NVIDIA showed us a demo of a Tegra K1 running a game simulation with the DX11-based Unreal Engine 4, and it just looked fantastic. Far ahead of anything weve ever seen on a mobile device. This is probably the first time when a mobile GPUs capability can really be called console-quality (almost every mobile GPU vendor makes that claim every year). While the GPUs on Tegras 2, 3 and 4 were a bit disappointing, Tegra K1 is exactly the innovation I was always expecting from NVIDIA in the ultra-mobile space.
NVIDIA has, for the first time, come up with a mobile SoC that really pushes the boundaries of mobile processing. Its Denver cores will probably rival, if not outperform, the Apple A7s performance, and its 192-core Kepler GPU is downright amazing. Wrap that up with a 5W TDP, and you have just about the most impressive SoC to date. Now all NVIDIA has to do is ensure it can get OEMs to release devices using the Tegra K1, and before the competition catches up. Tegra 4s time-to-market wasnt bad, but the adoption of its last SoC wasnt very widespread, and Qualcomms SoCs simply trumped the Tegra 4 in terms of OEM adoption. Hopefully NVIDIA will try to change that with the Tegra K1, maybe by releasing a Tegra K1 with an integrated Icera modem to attempt to find its way into LTE-enabled smartphones. For the first time NVIDIA has industry leading performance (previously Qualcomm held that title), so now it only needs to attract OEMs to use this fine silicon on their devices.
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