Surface Pro 4 = Skylake with eDRAM?

[davygee]

The graphics performance on the Surface and Ipad Pro should be pretty close, with the Surface winning in things like 3dmark and the Ipad likely winning in things like GFXBench. And that is taking Apple's claim of 2x GPU performance of Ipad Air 2 literally across all benchmarks.

Are you sure about that? I'm talking about the Intel HD Graphics 515/520 that are in the entry models of Surface Pro not the Iris HD graphics in the i7 models?

 

[dahorns]

Are you sure about that? I'm talking about the Intel HD Graphics 515/520 that are in the entry models of Surface Pro not the Iris HD graphics in the i7 models?

Pretty confident. Just compare the 3dmark scores of the SP3 with the 4300u to the IPad Air 2.

http://www.futuremark.com/hardware/mobile/Apple+iPad+Air+2/review

http://www.futuremark.com/hardware/mobile/Microsoft+Surface+Pro+3+(Core+i5)/review

You can also compare it to the scores of the 5200u in the Dell XPS 13:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8983/dell-xps-13-review/4

As you can see, the intel iGPUs have a large advantage in 3dmark (both graphics and physics). Even if Apple doubles the scores, the best it'll do is roughly match Broadwells GPU in Icestorm unlimited graphics subscore. It'd have to almost quadruple the physics score to get even.

But, on the other hand, the A8X is roughly even with the HD5500 for Broadwell on GFXBenches. So, you may see Apple retain an advantage there, especially given that the A9 in the 6s performs the same or slightly better than the A8X.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Actually in solution like eDRAM what matters the most is standby power. It is not unreasonable to expect that for quite a few workloads it is cheaper in power to go to EDRAM instead of DRAM ( even if power use is higher it allows CPU/GPU to complete race to sleep earlier ).

Rumors are that there's good results with the Skylake mobile chips in terms of power use but its all relative. Apple makes far better gains. Call it unfair, but that's the reality. And then Intel needs to prove that their claims are true(unlike the Core M).

MS's claims of 30-50% faster(depending on the comparison) of the Surface Pro 4 is yet another disappointment. That kind of gains suggest that they are comparing on the iGPU, which can only be true with the Iris parts.

Is it me but all that work getting the eDRAM getting 30% improvement seems like an exercise in futility? When did we start getting chips with the rate of improvement that existed in other industries like automobile engines?

I don't care about all this "eDRAM" and "5-wide decoder" tech when the real world products turn out to be pretty miserable in gains. Sure, we can have computers nowadays that allows it to run 4K displays and really good VR and cinema quality graphics, but that's no justification to sell new products that offer minimal improvement at much higher price. Yes, see how awesome the experiences you get with your current computer? Now spend yet another $1500 for 20% more.

I remember Intel boasting about how "Moore's Law" on an automobile would have meant we'd have cars with 1 million MPG at $5 or some ridiculous number. Perhaps they are forgetting that automobiles have reached that saturation point in technology much earlier than computers did.

 

[stingerman]

I think Microsoft admitting that they required liquid cooling and are heavier says it all. Maybe next years model then.

 

[dahorns]

I think Microsoft admitting that they required liquid cooling and are heavier says it all. Maybe next years model then.

That is a bit misleading. Microsoft came up with a really clever cooling system. Good for them. That doesn't mean it is "necessary". I'm sure they could have plugged everything into the Surface Pro 3's body and had no issues. Remember, we are talking about 15 watt processors, not Core M.

Also, the SP4 is lighter (and thinner), not heavier, than the SP3.

MS's claims of 30-50% faster(depending on the comparison) of the Surface Pro 4 is yet another disappointment. That kind of gains suggest that they are comparing on the iGPU, which can only be true with the Iris parts.

30% faster than the SP3 could easily (and likely) be for certain multi-threaded tasks. The SP3 is Haswell after all, and even mobile Broadwell saw a nice uptick in multi-threaded benches compared to mobile Haswell. The graphics uptick should be much larger than 30% going from Haswell to Skylake, even for non-iris models.

50% faster than the MacBook Air is more problematic since the MacBook Air is on Broadwell. I imagine you have to be right in that they could be comparing the GPU performance of the i7-5650u of the Air and the Iris performance for the SP4.

 

[Pheesh]

isn't the liquid cooling only for the model that packs a discrete nvidia GPU anyway...

 

[Roland00Address]

I am not disappointed that microsoft is charging how much they are for their surface pro tablets and surface books. Yes it is outrageously expensive for what you get, but they are for the most part the best windows tablets out there, and people are willing to pay those prices for the best. Furthermore microsoft goal is three fold

1) Not lose money on the surface line

2) Make the oems, happy and not trying to win market share for the sake of winning market share, the goal is to make the oems make better tablets and prevent people from going to apple. Thus they set a really good experience on the high end and hope the oems adopt many of those features based of the public demanding those features or else they go buy surface

3) Hope this little features trickle down and microsoft retains being the OS of choice for high end devices and not lose marketshare to apple on the high end, and android/chrome on the low end. In other words make windows less sucky, and less race to the bottom which has occurred since the netbook revolution.

-----

What I am angry about are these things

1) They did not make any core m models in smaller form factors that are passively cooled. For example they could have updated the surface 3 non pro lines and say these are the surface 4s with both atom and core m options

2) Still only 1 usb port, and no usb c. Why can't we have 2 ports, for example remove the mini displayport port and replace it with a usb c. Hell you can put more than 1 port on there.

3) They destroyed price points and did not use some of the skus that intel has that just makes sense. For example

In the surface pro 3 line we had this sku

Intel Core i3 4020y. 1.5 ghz+hyperthreading, 20 GPU Eus, 11.5w tdp, but it had a lower real world tdp due to it being the model that could be passively cooled if you used sdp settings and not the desired 11.5w non throttling 100% 24/7 normal workload tasks.

It was $799 with the pen, 4gb of ram, 64gb storage.

Well guess what Intel has released a similar sky m processor

Intel 6th Gen Pentium 4405y. 1.5 ghz+hyperthreading (yes a pentium with hyperthreading). 24 GPU Eus, 6 watt tdp with a 4.5 watt tdp down.

So why do we have a model that starts at $899 and not any lower price models to bridge the gap between $500 cherrytrail 2gbs, and $600 cherrytrail 4gbs both of which do not include the pin?

I honestly do not know why they did not use a sku that is literally a drop in replacement for them. Price this sku at $799 or $750 and you are giving the customer more options and it is a direct replacement for what you used to offer at that price of $799. In other words you killed a product in a specific price point.

And if it was competing with the higher end models too much, then just put it in a surface 3 case that is that 10.8" screen.

Is it so much that I want a good skylake tablet that is passively cooled and does not have to get even larger. Why are you trying to make the surfaces into laptop clones. Tablets have purposes too especially when they have windows, kickstands, and active digitizers.



I am so glad that they are making a surface book but I just do not understand microsoft sometimes. I understand not making the oems angry but these are obvious simple things to implement

 

[IntelUser2000]

30% faster than the SP3 could easily (and likely) be for certain multi-threaded tasks. The SP3 is Haswell after all, and even mobile Broadwell saw a nice uptick in multi-threaded benches compared to mobile Haswell. The graphics uptick should be much larger than 30% going from Haswell to Skylake, even for non-iris models.

50% faster than the MacBook Air is more problematic since the MacBook Air is on Broadwell. I imagine you have to be right in that they could be comparing the GPU performance of the i7-5650u of the Air and the Iris performance for the SP4.

The metric used has to be the same, so 30% against SP3 and 50% against MBA is either CPU, OR GPU. Otherwise the statement is pretty retarded.

Anyway a video with a MS guy says 30/50% is a general gain with CPU. He also says 80% "i7 to i7".

Now I am thinking the gains are in some basic benchmark or an obscure one that doesn't reflect real world benchmarks. There's no way that SP3 is faster than MBA in overall.

 

[tipoo]

CPUs revealed - so as I thought when Panos was saying "add the two additional processors, it's fundamentally two times as powerful", he didn't mean CPU cores, he was doing some meaningless addition of the GPU, G5 chip, and CPU. Dual core CPU.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2989...-surface-pro-4-chips-and-why-they-matter.html

Only the top end Surface Pro 4 has Iris Graphics, the Surface Board does not.

 

[Arachnotronic]

CPUs revealed - so as I thought when Panos was saying "add the two additional processors, it's fundamentally two times as powerful", he didn't mean CPU cores, he was doing some meaningless addition of the GPU, G5 chip, and CPU. Dual core CPU.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2989...-surface-pro-4-chips-and-why-they-matter.html

Only the top end Surface Pro 4 has Iris Graphics, the Surface Board does not.

Gotta love marketing BS :thumbsup:

 

[NTMBK]

Gotta love marketing BS :thumbsup:

Obligatory:

 

[beginner99]

What I am angry about are these things
--snip--

Add to that the fact that you can't get the i3 with 8gb RAM and 512 GB of storage. You have to go i7 to get 512 GB.

 

[EightySix Four]

1) Not lose money on the surface line

2) Make the oems, happy and not trying to win market share for the sake of winning market share, the goal is to make the oems make better tablets and prevent people from going to apple. Thus they set a really good experience on the high end and hope the oems adopt many of those features based of the public demanding those features or else they go buy surface

3) Hope this little features trickle down and microsoft retains being the OS of choice for high end devices and not lose marketshare to apple on the high end, and android/chrome on the low end. In other words make windows less sucky, and less race to the bottom which has occurred since the netbook revolution.

What I am angry about are these things

1) They did not make any core m models in smaller form factors that are passively cooled. For example they could have updated the surface 3 non pro lines and say these are the surface 4s with both atom and core m options

2) Still only 1 usb port, and no usb c. Why can't we have 2 ports, for example remove the mini displayport port and replace it with a usb c. Hell you can put more than 1 port on there.

3) They destroyed price points and did not use some of the skus that intel has that just makes sense.

It seems pretty clear that your first three are directly the reason they didn't do the second three.

1) I would hazard a guess they consider the Surface 3 to be a relatively new device and didn't feel the need to update it just yet. I'd be willing to bet they try and put the Surface and Surface Pro on a combined release cadence the next go around, but who knows. They have pretty repeatedly abandoned cheaper versions of their hardware so they don't compete with OEMs, sometimes I wonder if they release them only when they don't think the OEMs are doing a good enough job to goad them back into making different hardware, then drop it when they get the response they want.

2) People would be pissed if they removed that display port, I know I would be because all of the offices I work out of/frequent already have mini display port adapters for the displays and projectors due to how common they are on Macs. There also isn't a lot of space for a third port. I have a hub in my bag I use if I must have multiple devices connected, but it's been rare.

3) Back to the first point, these SKUs are more competitive with their OEMs on pricing and probably don't sell as well. Those two negatives plus the cost of the additional SKU probably killed those off.

 

[Blitzvogel]

I think it's possible the A9X could approach or match the Nvidia X1's graphics performance, but I'm very pessimistic about it reaching even GT4e horsepower.

As for the dGPU in the Surface Book, I imagine it's some custom 768 CUDA core part, maybe even a secret first Nvidia dGPU on 20 nm. The Tegra X1 is 20nm, so it's a sensible prediction. Also the premium price of the Surface Book makes sense if MS is getting "premium" chips with the best binning characteristics and new processes that make it possible to get very good dGPU performance in the form factor.

 

[EightySix Four]

I think it's possible the A9X could approach or match the Nvidia X1's graphics performance, but I'm very pessimistic about it reaching even GT4e horsepower.

As for the dGPU in the Surface Book, I imagine it's some custom 768 CUDA core part, maybe even a secret first Nvidia dGPU on 20 nm. The Tegra X1 is 20nm, so it's a sensible prediction. Also the premium price of the Surface Book makes sense if MS is getting "premium" chips with the best binning characteristics and new processes that make it possible to get very good dGPU performance in the form factor.

https://twitter.com/DennisBeatty/status/652296953728995329

"Modified" 960m with 1gb.

 

[IntelUser2000]

I think it's possible the A9X could approach or match the Nvidia X1's graphics performance, but I'm very pessimistic about it reaching even GT4e horsepower.

I am not sure where you got it anywhere near being GT4e. GT4e isn't even for mobiles like Surface Pros. GT3e is what's going to Surface Pro 4.

There's likely a 2x+ performance difference between GT3e and GT4e.

Absolute performance isn't a problem for Intel. Spending many more watts than Ax SoCs but at same performance is what's the issue. 15W GT2+CPU should have been way above the performance of 3-4W phone class A9 SoC especially considering Intel's "process lead" and 5x the price. It puts in question everything: Is Intel's design team any good at all? Is their process tech any good at all? You are a blip in mobile and performance advance in PCs have practically stalled. What's the reason for $10 billion investment in 14nm again?

 

[cytg111]

So, reviews are up.. And it seems like they got the throttling under control. One watt more and haswell->skylake has done the trick it seems. That means that, under load, SP4 pretty much destroys SP3.
Now the book looks good too though... confused again.