News Intel to launch sub-10W Ivy Bridge Y chips at CES

[Gareth Halfacree]

Ultra-low power chips heading to tablets.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardwar...ivy-bridge-y/1

[r3loaded]

Well, you didn't expect to buy BGA soldered chips from Scan did you?

I'm guessing that these Y series will crop up in the Surface Pro?

[Anfield]

its likely that they are headed for the surface pro yep, although given that haswell is around the corner I'd say don't buy a surface pro and wait for the surface pro 2 or whatever they'll end up calling it.

[Stelph]

This news has certainly made me re-think buying a Clover Trail tablet if the release of these chips is so close! At the very least it should cause a dip in the price of the one im most interested in (Acer W510)

I do wonder however if there will be any performance benefit from these new chips or if it is simply power saving only, considering the W510 is capable of 8 hours (plus 8 hours more from the keyboard dock battery) these new chips will certainly be impressive

Why cant smartphones have similar leaps in battery life?

[greigaitken]

even if intel could flick a switch and get tdp to 1 watt, still doesnt do all that much for battery life when you still have to power the screen. If intel spent their next 10bn on battery tech instead, you'd get a better result, but then that would dilute their manufacturing advantage...

[jrs77]

Seeing the current i3-3217UE sitting at 17W, someone has to ask what they cut down to lower the power by almost half.

Maybe reducing clockspeed to 1-1.2 GHz and cutting down the iGPU aswell.

[azazel1024]

Likely reduced clock speeds of GPU and CPU combined with probably cherry picking the chips further than what is done for the ULV parts and then running at even lower voltages.

It might even involve going so far as changing the actual transistors on the chip to be extremely low leakage transistors.

Currently ULV Ivy Bridge chips seem to run roughly 4w per core loaded, so just the CPU end of things already is sub 10W TDP, though that doesn't include GPU or the other on die stuff (which when maxed out can push things to roughly 20w...which means TDP is exceeded, which results in the GPU being throttled a bit, to roughly 900Mhz to get back under the 17w TDP after a minute or so of turbo speeds exceeding TDP).

I'd would imagine that we are going to be looking at chips running in the 1-1.5Ghz range maybe with turbos that could boost them to 1.4-2Ghz range and probably a GPU running around 250Mhz base clock with maybe turbos in the 500-800Mhz range.

A fair amount slower than ULV Ivy even, but whicked faster than Cortex A15 or Atom (probably roughly 2-3x faster still than a quad core A15 for a dual core 1.5Ghz Ivy Bridge processor).

[Anfield]

Yeah, this should eat atom for breakfast, although it does make it kind of questionable why intel even bothers with atom any more if they can scale the desktop cpus down to sub 10w.

[Hanoken]

"Last Vegas later this..."

um... you mean Las Vegas...?

[rollo]

With Arm chips below 4watts its still way too much for tablet or smartphone consumption which i guess is the idea.

Does not matter if it performs 10 times faster ( which it wont ) if it dies in 10mins flat.

a 10 watt apple ipad would last about 4hrs in full usage for reference.

Also something wierd is going on with intel chips and battery usage. As the samsung ativ thing with clevo chip lasts nearly 10hrs + without dock. The surface using the same chip scrapes in around 8hrs. so its not all intels fault. ( samsung ativ has a smaller battery than the surface does)

[dicobalt]

I think ARM's head is about to roll. Intel seems to have the power/performance advantage going forward.

[fluxtatic]

Originally Posted by Anfield

Yeah, this should eat atom for breakfast, although it does make it kind of questionable why intel even bothers with atom any more if they can scale the desktop cpus down to sub 10w.

I'd agree - it hardly seems worth the bother that Intel will finally re-architect Atom into a proper OoO processor and put it on the current process node starting next year (Atom traditionally has been turned out in the older fabs that are a node behind the fabs used for the current generation - Ivy's on 22, Atom's on 32.)

If they can get IB down to 10, how low can Haswell go? Have to wonder, too, if maybe they'll just keep the Atom branding even if the arch inside is Haswell. Lucky for Intel that Atom doesn't have the lackluster reputation amongst the general public that it seems to with tech enthusiasts, and so the name won't hurt it.

[r3loaded]

Originally Posted by fluxtatic

If they can get IB down to 10, how low can Haswell go? Have to wonder, too, if maybe they'll just keep the Atom branding even if the arch inside is Haswell. Lucky for Intel that Atom doesn't have the lackluster reputation amongst the general public that it seems to with tech enthusiasts, and so the name won't hurt it.

While all Atom chips so far are essentially modernised derivatives of the Pentium 3 with PowerVR GPUs, future Intel Atom chips should be roughly based off the current-generation Core architecture of their time (e.g. Silvermont will share a lot with Haswell) and will use Intel's GPU IP. I think they're intending for Atom to be used in phones and mainstream tablets that require sub-4W TDP, with Core going in the high-end tablet/ultrabook market.

Apparently the arrival of the 14nm Broadwell architecture should bring low-power Core chips that are completely fanless. I can't wait to see what a fanless Surface Pro or MacBook Air looks like!