Intel's press conference tomorrow should be interesting.
1. Improved robustness of USB3 wake after D3
2. Improved USB2 charging capability to support higher current.
3. USB2 reference clock improvements to reduce corner case stress scenarios.
Meh.
Should be more interesting than CES at least (and Exynos Infinity). We'll see if there are any nice design wins.
I do look forward to the Merrifield launch. It's actually a pretty decent platform...but it really does need design wins.
SanDisk Announces Optimized iNAND Extreme eMMC for Bay Trail
We've started looking more closely at the embedded storage used in smartphones and tablets, and have mostly come away disappointed. Thankfully there appears to be some progress being made in the space. I remember being relatively impressed with the behavior of the eMMC in Intel's Bay Trail FFRDs at their benchmarking event a week and a half ago. The IO performance wasn't perfect, but it was definitely much better than I had been expecting.
Today SanDisk announced that it will be bringing an optimized version of its iNAND Extreme solution to Bay Trail tablets. Architecturally iNAND Extreme is a combination of NAND and eMMC controller in a single package. The device supports eMMC 4.51 (HS200) and uses SanDisk's own 19nm MLC (2bpc) NAND. Capacities go all the way up to 128GB for a single device, which SanDisk arrives at by stacking 16 x 64Gbit 19nm MLC NAND die.
Sustained performance isn't too shabby. SanDisk promises sequential reads/writes of up to 150/45MBps and 4KB random read/write speeds of up to 4K/800 IOPS. I suspect these numbers are based on the largest configurations, but I would expect similarly good performance even for the 64GB and maybe even 32GB versions. The 4KB random write results are sustained, not peak, and are measured by looking at performance across a 1GB LBA range. In the case of the 128GB drive that test leaves a ton of spare area, which helps explain the relatively good performance compared to what we're used to in the market. I'd love to see true worst case scenario performance for SanDisk's iNAND. The promised sequential read performance is outstanding. We've seen mobile devices break the 100MB/s sequential read barrier, but none have hit 150MB/s yet. Sequential write performance is also pretty good.
The Bay Trail optimizations come via some custom tuning on the firmware. I suspect Intel has its own performance targets and behaviors it wants to encourage on Bay Trail tablets and SanDisk is likely just responding to those requests. You can also find iNAND Extreme on other, non-Intel platforms as well.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7347/sandisk-announces-optimized-inand-extreme-emmc-for-bay-trail
Computer Bottleneck said:According to this link 800 IOPS works out to 3.125 MB/s.
If it actually works that good in the hands of testers it will be an improvement over the 4K random write scores in the Anandtech Nexus 7 article here.
With all of that out of the way, how does the eMMC solution in the new Nexus 7 stack up? Sequential read performance continues to be quite good for such a small/lower power device. Sequential write speed isn't terrible either. Even random read performance looks solid. It's random write performance that just needs work across the industry. We realistically need to probably be at 10x where we are today in random write performance, perhaps a bit lower if the storage makers can focus on IO consistency/minimum sustained IOPS.
......but even at 3.125 MB/s 4K random write it sounds like eMMC still has a way to go. (although Anand did make the caveat about IO consistency/mininum sustained IOPS.)
That and they didn't announce any design win with the larger handset makers. But it's no surprise (neither good or bad) for those following Intel mobile efforts.Has anyone noticed that Merrifield only works with the XMM 7160? That means there is no WCDMA, nor TD-SCDMA. That effectively rules it out of American and Chinese markets.
The first "64-bit" Bay Trail-T tablets:
HP ProPad 600 [no word on pricing - April release]
HP ElitePad 1000 [$739 - March release]
More information can be found here.
Weighing 3.08 pounds and measuring 0.86 (H) x 12.12 (W) x 8.46 (D) inches, the X360 should be pretty easy to carry around. Wearing an 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768 display, the X360 is powered by one of two Intel Bay Trail processors, depending on which configuration you opt for: the Intel Pentium N2820 clocked at 2.13 GHz, or the Intel Pentium N3520 running at 2.17 GHz. RAM can be had in 4GB or 8GB amounts, while the hard drives available with the X360 range from 320GB, 5,400-rpm mechanical units, to a hybrid drive that combines a 500GB, 5,400-rpm disk with 8GB of flash storage.
Merrifield failed yes. Only dualcore, the XMM 7160 drawbacks and it's too late.
The lack of CDMA is the main issue. Quoting Ashraf Eassa:I'm not a big follower of modems, so could tell me what those drawbacks are?
7160 lacks TD-LTE, TD-SCDMA, CDMA, and LTE-Advanced support
Agree, but marketing is everything and has been for years (or no one would have bought Pentium 4 -- GHz-is-all-you-need-to-accelerate-Internet -- back then :biggrin.But failed? Too late for what? And what's wrong with a dualcore? It's an SoC for phones, not desktops. I bet even a single core Silvermont will demolish those small and slow quadcore A7s. Quadcores are bottlenecked by thermal limits. Dualcores are ideal for phones. They allow superior single threaded performance while still having enough multithreaded performance for consumer workloads.
not sure what u guys expected. they said their revenues are flat for the FY. they do not believe they will win many designs with these chips. hopefully the hype around broxton pays off
btw this is getting off topic. time for a new thread on merrifirld/moorefield
If you mean failed from a economic perspective, I guess you might be right. But S805 is also already 2 months announced, but doesn't have any design wins, so it's probably too early to review Merrifield's accomplishments in its lifetime .