The Intel Atom Thread

[bullzz]

@Homeles - "I'm doubtful of the veracity of this statement."
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1965731-intel-dont-believe-the-lies

bay trail android tablets should be available in Q2. and remember, bay trail may not be performance leader but is 64 bit capable. competitors are atleast 6 months behind correct?

 

[witeken]

Intel has released new Bay Trail chips for laptops: http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2014/...30_more_Bay_Trail-M_chips_are_on_the_way.html

 

[cbn]

Another Bay Trail Mini-ITX, the J1900N-D3V by Gigabyte:

http://www.fanlesstech.com/2014/02/quad-core-bay-trail-goodness.html

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4918#sp

J1900 quad core
two SO-DIMM slots
two 3 Gbps SATA ports
dual Gigabit LAN
Mini PCI-E
PCI
DVI-D
D-SUB
four usb 3.0 on the rear panel
two serial ports on the rear panel

This brings the total number of consumer Bay Trail Mini-ITX up eight:

Gigabyte GA-J1800N-D2H http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4881#ov
Gigabyte GA-J1800N-D2P http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4895#sp
Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4918#sp
MSI J1800I http://us.msi.com/product/mb/J1800I_.html
Biostar J1800NM http://www.biostar-usa.com/app/en-us/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=688
ECS BAT-I(V1.0) http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Pr...goryID=1&DetailName=Feature&MenuID=17&LanID=0
ECS BAT-I2(V1.0) (No longer listed on the website, but did say Coming Soon not so long ago)
ECS BAT-TI --> http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ecs-v20-mini-lake-bat-i-v20,25679.html

One more Bay Trail Mini-ITX (bringing the total number of consumer Bay Trail boards to nine) :

http://www.fanlesstech.com/2014/03/asus-debuts-value-bay-trail-motherboard.html

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/J1800IC/

ASUS J1800I-C

Celeron J1800
two SO-DIMM slots
one PCI-Express x1 slot
one Mini PCI Express slot
two SATA 3 Gbps ports
one usb 3.0
four usb 2.0
HDMI and VGA
one COM port
one PS/2 port
Giagbit Ethernet (Realtek 8111G)
3 audio ports

 

[beginner99]

Also if going into the design win realm... Isn't it the case that you can pretty much summarize Intel's lack of success in that area to two factors? The first being certain uneducated international markets where an SoC using four or eight ARM A7 cores is believed to be superior to a dual core Merrifield purely on merits of core count? And the second being those markets where the first design choice is the modem to ensure it has the checkmark capabilities? Which is to say that Qualcomm has a lock on these markets because no one else has caught up to them on the modem side yet. And that lock is strong enough that Samsung is forced into using Qualcomm SoCs for these markets rather than their Exynos SoCs. (It's pretty obvious that they want to use Exynos when possible given that they go through the expense of designing and manufacturing a second version of many of their phones using Exynos for those markets where a non-Qualcomm modem is acceptable.)

My thoughts exactly.

 

[StrangerGuy]

My thoughts exactly.

Just look at Asus who uses Qualcomm for their flagship mobile devices despite their main business being tied to Intel by the hands and the feet. Pretty telling how much Intel is liked around these parts. No subsidy is going to bury that wretched strong-arming history of theirs.

 

[jj109]

Just look at Asus who uses Qualcomm for their flagship mobile devices despite their main business being tied to Intel by the hands and the feet. Pretty telling how much Intel is liked around these parts. No subsidy is going to bury that wretched strong-arming history of theirs.

How did you manage to fabricate an anti-Intel tirade from someone's analysis of currently available SoCs?

 

[Nothingness]

Just look at Asus who uses Qualcomm for their flagship mobile devices despite their main business being tied to Intel by the hands and the feet. Pretty telling how much Intel is liked around these parts. No subsidy is going to bury that wretched strong-arming history of theirs.

OTOH ASUS probably is the company that has the highest number of mobile devices using Intel chips. What is strange though is that they just announced at CES some new low-end phones based on Intel SoC (ZenFone 4, 5 and 6), but from the old poor generation, and didn't announce any Merrifield-based phone (anyway unless I missed something there's still been no Merrifield-based phone officially announced by any company, right?).

 

[krumme]

Just look at Asus who uses Qualcomm for their flagship mobile devices despite their main business being tied to Intel by the hands and the feet. Pretty telling how much Intel is liked around these parts. No subsidy is going to bury that wretched strong-arming history of theirs.

Intels offering is not remotely compettitive with qq s800 (modem, DSP, integration ....) so we will have to wait and see what Intels history will mean. Its not like Samsung and Apple dont use strong arm tactics either. The level of strong arm tactics is mostly tied to the level of monopoly the company have in its business.

I am not so sure eg Google will not use Intel for their next nexus 7 (8), as it looks like an obvious choise for a cheap tablet without modem. Intel is the small and insignificant player in this market, with a weak portfolio nobody wants to pay for. Google can easily control any monopoly tricks from Intel as they are an even bigger dog. Why not get a Intel cpu for cheap and put some pressure on QQ?

 

[R0H1T]

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm as annoyed by Intel's sluggish pace in this area as anyone else. And that's a perfectly valid argument to make. Whereas the article in question... yup, not a single mention of device wins. It's purely attacking Merrifield on the grounds of lacking CPU performance compared to Apple's A7 when a previous article by the same author gave the opposite impression by actually digging into the very same benchmark results.

Also if going into the design win realm... Isn't it the case that you can pretty much summarize Intel's lack of success in that area to two factors? The first being certain uneducated international markets where an SoC using four or eight ARM A7 cores is believed to be superior to a dual core Merrifield purely on merits of core count? And the second being those markets where the first design choice is the modem to ensure it has the checkmark capabilities? Which is to say that Qualcomm has a lock on these markets because no one else has caught up to them on the modem side yet. And that lock is strong enough that Samsung is forced into using Qualcomm SoCs for these markets rather than their Exynos SoCs. (It's pretty obvious that they want to use Exynos when possible given that they go through the expense of designing and manufacturing a second version of many of their phones using Exynos for those markets where a non-Qualcomm modem is acceptable.)

This is a pretty stupid comment actually, considering Intel still employs PowerVR graphics that also feature in a lot of these SoC, & it's not like you're running BF4 or winrar on these devices so the ST performance matters not much, as it usually does on a desktop ! Also I take it you haven't used these devices with more cores or you wouldn't be saying such things, see Exynos Octa for instance, & with true Octa core SoC coming shortly I wonder if this Intel mania will subside in the not so distant future ? Just to add to this debate the most important component in a 720/1080p phone(1600p for high end tablets) is the GPU(like PowerVR for Intel & even Apple) alongside eNAND, then comes the RAM(cause I've seen good Android phones struggle with puny amounts of RAM) & lastly the CPU, cause the only app(s) that really tax this last component are benchmarks & not much else !

 

[Homeles]

Just look at Asus who uses Qualcomm for their flagship mobile devices despite their main business being tied to Intel by the hands and the feet. Pretty telling how much Intel is liked around these parts. No subsidy is going to bury that wretched strong-arming history of theirs.

Hoo-boy. well that was a bit contrived.

 

[SlimFan]

This is a pretty stupid comment actually, considering Intel still employs PowerVR graphics that also feature in a lot of these SoC, & it's not like you're running BF4 or winrar on these devices so the ST performance matters not much, as it usually does on a desktop ! Also I take it you haven't used these devices with more cores or you wouldn't be saying such things, see Exynos Octa for instance, & with true Octa core SoC coming shortly I wonder if this Intel mania will subside in the not so distant future ? Just to add to this debate the most important component in a 720/1080p phone(1600p for high end tablets) is the GPU(like PowerVR for Intel & even Apple) alongside eNAND, then comes the RAM(cause I've seen good Android phones struggle with puny amounts of RAM) & lastly the CPU, cause the only app(s) that really tax this last component are benchmarks & not much else !

I'm curious what you use a phone for. Personally, I mostly use it to make phone calls, surf the web, and read my email. Phone calls aren't terribly demanding on the CPU. The other two actually are. As I sit there and wait for the web page to render (whether it be in the browser or the HTML email that all the cool kids use these days), I wish I had more single threaded CPU performance. I never want additional cores so that they can sit there idle while I'm waiting on the result of one or two CPUs to finish their work. Even if you watch videos or play games ... can you mention which games you play that are taxing? I think just about any phone in the world can play flappy birds at a nice frame rate.

Maybe you're confusing "hey, look at how fast I can flick left/right on the launcher" with good phone performance. Bottom basement GPUs have been able to render a 4x5 row of icons efficiently for quite some time. And sure, lots of the lower end phones use PowerVR graphics. But which one, and at what frequency?

It's pretty rare to max out four cores on a desktop on a regular basis, let alone eight. So yeah, personally, I would rather have 2 cores with excellent ST performance than I would an eight or sixteen cores with 1/3 of the ST perf...

 

[R0H1T]

I'm curious what you use a phone for. Personally, I mostly use it to make phone calls, surf the web, and read my email. Phone calls aren't terribly demanding on the CPU. The other two actually are. As I sit there and wait for the web page to render (whether it be in the browser or the HTML email that all the cool kids use these days), I wish I had more single threaded CPU performance. I never want additional cores so that they can sit there idle while I'm waiting on the result of one or two CPUs to finish their work. Even if you watch videos or play games ... can you mention which games you play that are taxing? I think just about any phone in the world can play flappy birds at a nice frame rate.

Just the usual stuff, like the one you mentioned, but don't play very many games as the Nexus 2 is rather old now. Now the point about (slowly)rendering a webpage can be solved by GPU acceleration, see the world of difference between IE 11 & IE 10 or earlier versions of IE, & improving the browser/rendering engine, since javascript performance depends a lot on the latter. Therefore ST performance doesn't really matter either way, also it's actually pretty saddening when people talk about better MT(GPU & CPU) performance in games & other applications on the desktop then bring the same ST argument in case of mobiles/tablets ! I've said this before that better MT/MC performance is the future of computing & unless we demand it, & not be satisfied by the ST performance lead a single chipmaker has over the rest, the mobile platform will evolve the way desktops have, which certainly isn't a good thing.

As for games games I don't play very many but I assume a 1080p or 1600p screen will still need a lot more GPU power than what we've got today.

Maybe you're confusing "hey, look at how fast I can flick left/right on the launcher" with good phone performance. Bottom basement GPUs have been able to render a 4x5 row of icons efficiently for quite some time. And sure, lots of the lower end phones use PowerVR graphics. But which one, and at what frequency?

The mid/low range SoC from the likes of Mediatek have PowerVR graphics, sufficient for that price bracket, which I assume isn't on Intel's radar atm. Now for the high end we have Mali 7xxx coming soon alongside Qualcomm's own competitor to PowerVR's rogue but since Intel don't have their solution to these GPU's it's pointless mentioning them in this part of the debate.

It's pretty rare to max out four cores on a desktop on a regular basis, let alone eight. So yeah, personally, I would rather have 2 cores with excellent ST performance than I would an eight or sixteen cores with 1/3 of the ST perf...

Again more ST performance is not the solution, I think Athlon vs P4 showed us why that is & yet here we are debating the same point ! I'm not saying go for server level performance/parallelism but going back to the ST vs MT debate is regression IMO.

 

[SiliconWars]

I am not so sure eg Google will not use Intel for their next nexus 7 (8), as it looks like an obvious choise for a cheap tablet without modem. Intel is the small and insignificant player in this market, with a weak portfolio nobody wants to pay for. Google can easily control any monopoly tricks from Intel as they are an even bigger dog. Why not get a Intel cpu for cheap and put some pressure on QQ?

It's the obvious choice because it's heavily subsidized yes - just like the original 7" with Tegra 3. The current Nexus 7 has sold poorly because non-Apple tablets long since became commodity items.

I believe there is a good chance of the Z3740 in the Nexus 8 but it'll have to be cheap as dirt to be any kind of "success". I'm not convinced that the tablet buying market has much of a clue about what is in them and simply buys on price.

 

[Khato]

This is a pretty stupid comment actually, considering Intel still employs PowerVR graphics that also feature in a lot of these SoC, & it's not like you're running BF4 or winrar on these devices so the ST performance matters not much, as it usually does on a desktop ! Also I take it you haven't used these devices with more cores or you wouldn't be saying such things, see Exynos Octa for instance, & with true Octa core SoC coming shortly I wonder if this Intel mania will subside in the not so distant future ? Just to add to this debate the most important component in a 720/1080p phone(1600p for high end tablets) is the GPU(like PowerVR for Intel & even Apple) alongside eNAND, then comes the RAM(cause I've seen good Android phones struggle with puny amounts of RAM) & lastly the CPU, cause the only app(s) that really tax this last component are benchmarks & not much else !

I'm having a hard time deciding whether or not the above is an attempt at sarcasm? In part because it starts off with the "it's not like you're running BF4 or winrar on these devices so the ST performance matters not much at all" when BF4 and winrar are two prime examples of heavily multi-threaded programs that can make do with lower ST performance.

Regardless, if you actually believe that there's a need for 4 or 8 cores on a smartphone, well, you're entitled to your opinion. But if you want to convince others you'll have to provide a rational argument for such. It's quite easy for me to do such with respect to my original statement - a dual core Merrifield is as fast as a quad core ARM A7 design even in heavily multi-threaded tasks, so you'd need to have more than four threads in order for an octal core ARM A7 design to pull ahead... and good luck finding smartphone workloads that use more than two cores for anything more than the occasional transient events. (The overwhelming majority of workloads are still just using 1 core for the current focus program while the other handles background/OS tasks.)

 

[R0H1T]

I'm having a hard time deciding whether or not the above is an attempt at sarcasm? In part because it starts off with the "it's not like you're running BF4 or winrar on these devices so the ST performance matters not much at all" when BF4 and winrar are two prime examples of heavily multi-threaded programs that can make do with lower ST performance.

Regardless, if you actually believe that there's a need for 4 or 8 cores on a smartphone, well, you're entitled to your opinion. But if you want to convince others you'll have to provide a rational argument for such. It's quite easy for me to do such with respect to my original statement - a dual core Merrifield is as fast as a quad core ARM A7 design even in heavily multi-threaded tasks, so you'd need to have more than four threads in order for an octal core ARM A7 design to pull ahead... and good luck finding smartphone workloads that use more than two cores for anything more than the occasional transient events. (The overwhelming majority of workloads are still just using 1 core for the current focus program while the other handles background/OS tasks.)

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear, according to me as of 2014 the CPU performance of an octa core(big little config) or even 2 cortex A15 is more than enough for 95% of tasks on a mobile/tablet :thumbsup:

The real advances need to be in the field of eNAND, GPU & to a lesser extent RAM(more RAM & faster than previous gen) as far as hardware is concerned but far more needs to be done on the software/OS front with better MT/MC performance which was missing in this last decade on the desktops, that we all have started using less & less. Now I expect Google to do more in this regard, than what MS did in the noughties, & a number of software developers moving quickly on this front especially with Android being the most popular OS on the planet.

You also haven't seen how ARM or Qualcomm's 64bit capable SoC deliver & it isn't as if Intel has already won the battle ! Intel is, from what I see, competing with the top of the line SoC from Qualcomm/Samsung & perhaps Mediatek, since they don't seem too keen on the mid/low budget categories, but to proclaim that they're already there with the solution everyone wants is a bit premature to say the least. For all intents & purposes the fact that they're going with Rogue even into 2015 shows that they're not there yet & no amount of ST lead is going to cut it for them cause the rest of the chipmakers are also progressing at a rabid pace, certainly a lot faster than what AMD did in the previous decade.

 

[bullzz]

@R0H1T - "Intel is, from what I see, competing with the top of the line SoC from Qualcomm/Samsung & perhaps Mediatek, since they don't seem too keen on the mid/low budget categories"
sofia is for low end category. they have bay trail for mid and high end category

"For all intents & purposes the fact that they're going with Rogue even into 2015 shows that they're not there yet"

No. they are using Rougue in 2014. broxton is rumored to have intel graphics

 

[R0H1T]

@R0H1T - "Intel is, from what I see, competing with the top of the line SoC from Qualcomm/Samsung & perhaps Mediatek, since they don't seem too keen on the mid/low budget categories"
sofia is for low end category. they have bay trail for mid and high end category

SoFIA is going to come towards the end of 2014 & since it hasn't been released yet we don't know how/if it will compete with the likes of Mediatek, which now controls a substantial part of the low budget market, or even Qualcomm's low end solutions.

"For all intents & purposes the fact that they're going with Rogue even into 2015 shows that they're not there yet"

No. they are using Rougue in 2014. broxton is rumored to have intel graphics

I thought Intel powered graphics were coming to their rescue in 2014 or was that another unsubstantiated rumor ? Regardless of whether Intel goes with or without their own graphics IP the fact is the competition, Nvidia/PowerVR et al, has better alternatives & as such Intel at this point in time or even in 2015 doesn't seem to have a compelling solution that'll force the OEM's to go for them, except the insane subsidies which will dry up sooner rather than later.

 

[Khato]

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear, according to me as of 2014 the CPU performance of an octa core(big little config) or even 2 cortex A15 is more than enough for 95% of tasks on a mobile/tablet :thumbsup:

Nope, wasn't clear at all. Especially since you bolded my statement of "The first being certain uneducated international markets where an SoC using four or eight ARM A7 cores is believed to be superior to a dual core Merrifield purely on merits of core count" and called it stupid When the above clarification implies the exact same perspective of higher single-threaded performance than what A7 provides being preferable to high core counts.

The real advances need to be in the field of eNAND, GPU & to a lesser extent RAM(more RAM & faster than previous gen) as far as hardware is concerned but far more needs to be done on the software/OS front with better MT/MC performance which was missing in this last decade on the desktops, that we all have started using less & less. Now I expect Google to do more in this regard, than what MS did in the noughties, & a number of software developers moving quickly on this front especially with Android being the most popular OS on the planet.

Well, good luck with getting software to improve their multithreading - it's a great thing to wish for but the majority of programs just plain don't lend themselves to such. Yes there are improvements that can be made but a lot of what can be done already has. Well, unless someone comes up with some novel technique.

That said, you're quite correct that one of the most glaring deficiencies on current mobile platforms is the eNAND. Hopefully the recently announced Sandisk solution ends up meeting its claims as that'll pretty much take care of that issue. Can't agree so much with either GPU or RAM though - GPU performance is a favorite one to emphasize because of what future games will make use of, but with the turnover rate on these devices the user has typically moved on to the next latest and greatest before games come out that actually made use of the last generation. But it's still a favorite battleground right now for the SoC vendors simply because it's an easy arena to claim superiority in - all it takes is throwing more die space and power at the problem. Lastly when it comes to RAM the demands are pretty much tied to GPU performance and again it's mostly just a question of power. Until we get another advancement in memory technology it's going to be difficult to markedly improve memory bandwidth without taking a marked hit on power consumption.

You also haven't seen how ARM or Qualcomm's 64bit capable SoC deliver & it isn't as if Intel has already won the battle ! Intel is, from what I see, competing with the top of the line SoC from Qualcomm/Samsung & perhaps Mediatek, since they don't seem too keen on the mid/low budget categories, but to proclaim that they're already there with the solution everyone wants is a bit premature to say the least. For all intents & purposes the fact that they're going with Rogue even into 2015 shows that they're not there yet & no amount of ST lead is going to cut it for them cause the rest of the chipmakers are also progressing at a rabid pace, certainly a lot faster than what AMD did in the previous decade.

True, we don't have a clue how ARM or Qualcomm's 64 bit SoCs will compare... because all we have thus far are PR announcements for mainstream A53 based designs and then the Denver-based K1 whenever it shows up. I believe that AMD is the only company who has announced an A57 based design? And it's for the server market. At this point I'm beginning to wonder if we'll even see A53 based mainstream SoCs before the second half of this year. As for the GPU side, well, we'll just have to wait and see how much of a difference there ends up being between series 6 and 6XT. My guess is that Intel went with series 6 on Moorefield simply because 6XT wasn't going to be available in time for integration. Who knows how fast the rest of the industry is going to move on graphics this year though - it could be anywhere from pretty close to stagnating if the only 20nm products are mainstream designs meant to flush out issues to another 50-100% gain if they do a performance 20nm SoC which uses the area scaling to pack more GPU.

 

[R0H1T]

Nope, wasn't clear at all. Especially since you bolded my statement of "The first being certain uneducated international markets where an SoC using four or eight ARM A7 cores is believed to be superior to a dual core Merrifield purely on merits of core count" and called it stupid

Actually I was being sarcastic because firstly I hail from one of these markets & secondly the reason people go for these quad core A7 phones is cause of price & not because they don't know much about its performance wrt Intel or any other top of the line SoC.

When the above clarification implies the exact same perspective of higher single-threaded performance than what A7 provides being preferable to high core counts.

This is definitely true that ST performance atm matters more than what MT/MC improvements can offer to us now. But as was the case with single vs dual or dual vs quad core debates for PC I wish for & hope that this time we won't have to wait so long to get to use all these cores properly.

As for the rest I do agree with you & that only time will tell whether Intel/ARM win this little battle or lose that bigger war.

 

[witeken]

SoFIA is going to come towards the end of 2014 & since it hasn't been released yet we don't know how/if it will compete with the likes of Mediatek, which now controls a substantial part of the low budget market, or even Qualcomm's low end solutions.

SoFIA is aimed at the entry market, 75$ phones and such, which should be very interesting since it will have Silvermont and their new 7260 modem.

I thought Intel powered graphics were coming to their rescue in 2014 or was that another unsubstantiated rumor ? Regardless of whether Intel goes with or without their own graphics IP the fact is the competition, Nvidia/PowerVR et al, has better alternatives & as such Intel at this point in time or even in 2015 doesn't seem to have a compelling solution that'll force the OEM's to go for them, except the insane subsidies which will dry up sooner rather than later.

Cherry Trail will have 16 gen8 EUs. Willow Trail and Broxton will have gen9 IGPs. Not sure why you think that won't be compelling, since Cherry Trail will have up to 6 times Bay Trail's theoretical performance, which is somewhere in between Adreno 320 and 330.

 

[Kneedragger]

From what I've seen the these combo mobo/cpu Baytrail boards are only coming with PCI-Express x1 V2.0. How slow do you guys think it would be using a SATA card to add more HD's?

 

[ShintaiDK]

From what I've seen the these combo mobo/cpu Baytrail boards are only coming with PCI-Express x1 V2.0. How slow do you guys think it would be using a SATA card to add more HD's?

PCIe 2.0 x1 is 500MB/sec. Plenty for slow HDs.

 

[Sweepr]

Last week news but somehow I missed this one. ECS announced a ''Bay Trail-T'' Android tablet at MWC 2014.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk_kBEJoHfk

http://translate.google.com.br/tran...0536603?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

ECS TA80TA1-1 specs
Atom Z3735E (quad-core running @ up to 1.83GHz)
1GB RAM
Android 4.2.2
1280x800 8'' screen
microUSB, microHDMI

Looks like an entry-level device. I'm curious about the price.

 

[Kneedragger]

PCIe 2.0 x1 is 500MB/sec. Plenty for slow HDs.

Thanks for the info

 

[Sweepr]

Google Nexus 8 on July 2014 Release Date Will Run on Vanilla Android 4.5 with Intel ‘Moorefield’ Mobile Chips – Reports

http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/5421...-release-date-specs-features.htm#.UxnoC4XHiPl

I'll take it with a grain of salt right now. Perhaps Merrifield would be better suited for a cheap 8'' tablet, and July seems a bit soon for Moorefield, but... interesting if true.