News Intel teases 4.5W Haswell Core chip

Have to look out for this SDP nonsense. It is a shame they feel the need to market it as such... seeing as consumers will no doubt be buying it in an already pre-assembled device which will no doubt be reviewed against its applicable competitors. Ergo, it doesn't matter what you do to your figures to hide the natural results, reviews will either say: "This thing is hot and thirsty like" or "This is cool and everlasting" or a combination of the two.

 

It's not complete nonsense - the expectation is that 99% of the time a tablet will not be maxing everything out as a desktop would as the usage demands will be low (because it's a tablet).

What Intel are trying to is allow OEMs to use a far more powerful core design in a tablet enclosure that will stay cool and sip power (<4.5W) most of the time due to the low load. If additional, performance is needed it can be provided for short bursts (up to 11W) until the tablet gets too hot, upon which it will throttle back. The idea is that even when throttled back to 4.5W, a Haswell chip will still beat the pants off Bay Trail as well as any current ARM chip.

 

Whilst I partially agree, now we are arguing about what is typical usage. Regardless of what is said, the lower TDP, with equivalent performance, if not better than before, would have put them in the same position.

The last thing I'd think you'd want to encourage is to design the products to be on the edge of their thermal limits using SDP as your metric - which I'm sure no sane product would do unless they are thinking of incorporating their own artificial limits.

Meanwhile, this term is already branded about. So consumers see it without really needing to... they just need a review of the end product. Since reading this, and reading this, you'll notice the headline always read something along the line of "Intel releasing 4.5watt chip" which they aren't - it's the potential to be a 4.5watt chip.

EDIT: It is still great none the less, don't get me wrong. I just think this is becoming a PR/marketing regurgitation exercise. Which if true, is at least vetted by Gareth who points out and explains the 4.5watt SDP figure

 

Sort of hit on the point. The point being that SDP is what it is going to be using most of the time. Load down the GPU and CPU and it is going to hit much higher power levels. IIRC it was slipped that the TDP of the chips is 11.5w. Again, I think.

So you have two situations here. You can utilize the chips in a chasis that can dissipate just 4.5w of power, because that is what it'll use "normally", but you are pretty much going to force extreme throttling the instant you hit heavy workloads. Or alternately, you can design a chasis that can cool more than 4.5w, which means under normal circumstances you'll have no issues and will be able to use heavier than normal workload situations with any problems as well as some turboing before things have to be pulled back.

Finally you could design a chasis that can handle the full 11.5w TDP, in which case the chip can run pretty freely, but you can also know power management wise, that it is generally only going to be using 4.5w (as most platform designers are concerned more about typical power use when designing battery size, but look at TDP more for chasis heat dissipation).

 

how is this different to Turbo on desktop/laptop processors? [kinda genuine question]

it spends the bulk of it's time at a given speed, overclocking itself by a set margin when extra oomph is needed within temp limits...

 

The problem I see is that when Im using low load apps on my ipad, it tends to be the case that I never need the extra power. However, if I'm for example playing a game which is fairly high load then Im going to want the power for longer than 'until it gets warm'.