Intel Unveils Moorestown and the Atom Z600, The Fastest Smartphone Platform?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 4, 2010 11:54 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Intel
- Atom
- Mobile
- SoCs
Power Gating
Until the Atom Z600 series, the only Intel CPUs to power gate were the Nehalem/Westmere derived chips. In Moorestown, everything is both power and clock gated.
The CPU itself has its usual power states; C0 implies full power, full performance, and C6 is a deep sleep state where power is shut off to the entire CPU and state is saved in a small amount of active SRAM. There’s finer grained clock and power gating in Lincroft than in Intel’s Core i7.
Moorestown is a SoC platform however, so we need some new power states. Intel calls them S0i1 and S0i3. As with CPU power states, the higher the number, the more that’s shut off.
Virtually all blocks in Lincroft and Langwell are clock and power gated. In S0i1, everything from the CPU and GPU to interconnects are power gated. From the sounds of it, S0i1 is where you’d find your smartphone if you just left it on the table for a few seconds. The display would shut off and all internal components would be power gated. Pick it back up, hit a button and you get pretty quick recovery.
S0i3 however completely powers down virtually all components and keeps a small amount of SRAM active with state data. This is the phone locked and in your pocket state.
Getting out of these power states is relatively quick. S0i3 takes around 3ms while S0i1 takes 1ms.
The impact of these idle states is huge. On a reference Moorestown platform (this includes the Moorestown chips, display, 3G radio, basically a fully functional phone), Intel measured total platform power in S0i3 at 21 - 23mW. That’s a ~50x reduction compared to Menlow, and that’s what makes Moorestown suitable for use in a smartphone.
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DanNeely - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
I think you're misunderstanding the slide. It's not saying 1024x600 to 1366x768, it's saying upto 1366x768 on interface A, upto 1024x600 on interface B.Mike1111 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Thanks for the clarification. Looks like I really misunderstood this sentence:"Lincroft only supports two display interfaces: 1024 x 600 over MIPI (lower power display interface) or 1366 x 768 over LVDS (for tablets/smartbooks/netbooks)."
uibo - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
I wonder how many transistors are there in a Cortex A9 core? Just the core nothing else.For me it seems that ARM could just double or quadruple their core count against the Intel solution while still maintaining lower transistor count.
Also they could just increase the CPU clock speed, if there is a market for the more power-hungry Intel solution the there is one for the ARM also.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
I would imagine even less smartphone software is written for multi-core now than was for desktop when dual-core CPUs started appearing in desktops. So going beyond 2 cores at this time is probably not a great move. Plus the dual core A9 isn't out to see power consumption yet, but even at 45nm I doubt it will be much below the current 65nm single-core chips if at all, so if Intel is already competitive then ARM doesn't exactly have the power budget to add cores.uibo - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
That actually makes sense. Nobody is going to write multi-threaded apps for a single thread CPU. I'd imagine that the number of apps, which experience is hindered by performance, is not that great at the moment. Games, browsers, UI, database for the info stored in your device - I'm not expecting these to scale perfectly across many cores but do expect a x0% performance increase.DanNeely - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
The real benefit for the 2nd core is probably multi-tasking. Your streaming music app can run in the background on the second core while your browser still has a full core to render web pages.Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Mooresetown has to support a desktop OS. Intel is clearly moving towards wireless computing. They are bringing wireless video. With wireless video you can turn your phone into a desktop pc instantly by adding a wireless monitor and keyboard. What is the point of moving in that direction if you're moving towards a crippled OS? (Not that windows isnt crippled, if you consider obesity a form of cripple.)If it needs a pci bus, then emulate one!
Caddish - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Just registered to say keep up the good work. Since the SSD antology I have red all of your article like that one and they are awesomelegoman666 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Excellent article, very well written.jasperjones - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Anand,You mention twice in the article that Apple and Google dominate the smartphone market. This is utter nonsense. The numbers from IDC as well as the numbers from Canalys clearly show that Nokia is the worldwide leader in the smartphone market. RIM is number 2. Apple is in the third place, the first company that produces Android devices, HTC, has the number 4 spot.
I realize that Nokia's market share in the U.S. is smaller than its global market share. However, even if we restrict ourselves to the U.S. market, RIM smartphone sales are bigger than those of Apple. They are also bigger than the sales of all Android smartphones combined.