The Intel Lakefield Deep Dive: Everything To Know About the First x86 Hybrid CPU
by Dr. Ian Cutress on July 2, 2020 9:00 AM ESTLakefield in Terms of Laptop Size
In a traditional AMD or Intel processor designed for laptops, we experience two to eight processing cores, along with some graphics performance, and it is up to the company to build the chip with the aim of hitting the right efficiency point (15 W, or 35/45 W) to enable the best performance for a given power window. These processors also contain a lot of extra connectivity and functionality, such as a dual channel memory controller, extra PCIe lanes to support external graphics, support for USB port connectivity or an external connectivity hub, or in the case of Intel’s latest designs, support for Thunderbolt built right into the silicon without the need for an external controller. These processors typically have physical dimensions of 150 square millimeters or more, and in a notebook, when paired with the additional power delivery and controllers needed such as Wi-Fi and modems, can tend towards the board inside the system (the motherboard) totaling 15 square inches total.
One of Qualcomm’s examples from 2018
For a Qualcomm processor designed for laptops, the silicon is a paired down to the essentials commonly associated with a smartphone. This means that modem connectivity is built into the processor, and the hardware associated with power delivery and USB are all on the scale of a smartphone. This means a motherboard designed around a Qualcomm processor will be around half the size, enabling different form factors, or more battery capacity in the same size laptop chassis.
With Intel’s new Lakefield processor design, the chip is a lot smaller than previous Intel implementations. The company designed the processor from the ground up, with as much included on the CPU as to not need additional chips on the motherboard, and to fit the dimensions similar to one of Qualcomm’s processors. Above is a slide showing how Intel believes that with an LTE modem included, a Lakefield motherboard can move down to 7.7 square inches, similar to a Qualcomm design. This leaves more room for battery inside a device.
When Intel compares it against its own previous low power CPU implementations, the company quotes a 60% decrease in overall board area compared to its first generation 4.5 W processors.
It is worth noting that for power delivery, Intel placed MIMCAPs inside the Lakefield silicon, much like a smartphone processor, and as a result it can get by on the power delivery implementation with a pair of PMICs (power management ICs). The reason why there is two is because of the two silicon dies inside – they are controlled differently for power for a number of technical reasons. If each layer within an active stacked implementation requires its own PMIC, that would presumably put an upper limit on future stacked designs – I fully expect Intel to be working on some sort of solution for this for it not to be an issue, however that wasn’t implemented in time for Lakefield.
For those that are interested, Lakefield’s PMICs are under the codenames Warren Cove and Castro Cover, and were developed in 2017-2018.
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ichaya - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link
SPEC is useful for some IPC comparisons, but it's questionable to use it for much else. PG bench in the phoronix link has a 50%+ speedup with SMT which is basically inline for perf/W/$ with Graviton 2 instance. The worst case is Casandra, but everything else is within ~5% for similar perf/$ if not comparable perf/W too since comparing TDP is workload dependent as well and not measured by most tests.XZ and Blender are ~45% faster with SMT in your openbenchmark link, but that's a 3900X (12-core/24-thread), so any comparisons to server chips (64-core Graviton 2) are unfair given power consumption and core differences. 4 times the L3 is also wrong, it's 50% more L2+L3 with half the cores and SMT if you're being fair between m6g.16xlarge or c6g.16xlarge and c5a.16xlarge.
Quantumz0d - Friday, July 3, 2020 - link
Intel has lost it's edge. And this whole portable nonsense is reaching peaks of stupidity. Those Lakefield processor equipped machines will be close to $1000 for their thin and ultra light 1 USB C / 1 3.5mm audio jack, what a fucking disaster.I had owned one ultrabook which is Acer Aspire S3 and I used to even play DotA2 on that, and after 1-2 years the whole machine heated like crazy, I repasted, no dice, cleaned fans, nothing. And then battery also stopped holding a charge. Now what ? That stupid POS is dead, not even worth, meanwhile a Haswell machine with rPGA socket, and an MXM slot from 2013 and guess what ? the GPU got an upgrade to Pascal 1070 MXM from Kepler 860M.
All these BGA trash machines will no longer hold charge nor have their serviceability, older ultrabooks atleast had a 2.5" drive, newer ones have NVMe SSDs, these 2 in 1 trash like most of the Surface lineup is almost impossible to even repair or service. And because of this thin and light market Windows 10 has been ruined as well to cater to this bs phenomenon and desktop class OS is hit with that ugly Mobile UX which lacks powerful software options, navigation and all. Plus you don't even get to repair it yourself due to non available servicing parts.
With Apple HW same thing, full BGA not even NVMe SSDs, and now they also started to make their Mac OS look and feel like iOS trash. This whole mobile and ultra portable garbage is ruining everything, from gaming to the HW.
PandaBear - Monday, July 6, 2020 - link
They don't want to cannibalize their highly profitable x86 business, so they have to give you crap for what you want if you want to pay less. The problem right now is other companies don't have to deal with this political monopoly BS and they are eating Intel for lunch.Most monopolies die this way: when their monopoly business is obsoleted and they hang on to it to milk the cow till it dies.
yeeeeman - Friday, July 3, 2020 - link
Tigerlake should also be in the pipeline soon, right?Deicidium369 - Saturday, July 4, 2020 - link
Benchmarks showing it destroying AMD Renoir at single core, and within 17% on MT - despite half the cores...https://wccftech.com/intel-10nm-core-i7-1165g7-cpu...
watzupken - Sunday, July 5, 2020 - link
"Benchmarks showing it destroying AMD Renoir at single core, and within 17% on MT - despite half the cores...https://wccftech.com/intel-10nm-core-i7-1165g7-cpu...
Till we see the actual performance, you need to take these leaks with a lot of salt. The test bed are not revealed in leaks and it is not possible to ascertain if it is a realistic number. This we don't have to speculate for long since it should be out pretty soon.
pugster - Friday, July 3, 2020 - link
Lakefield's 2.5w standby sounds kind of high. ARM cpu is probably much lower than that.Ian Cutress - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
2.5 mWProDigit - Friday, July 3, 2020 - link
Qualcomm has proven that a single fast core isn't enough. Intel needs to at least do 2 fast cores. Then add at least 6 atom cores.But if Intel wants to compete with AMD, it'll need to create a quad core big setup, with at least 10 to 12 atom cores.
Any less will be too little. These are too little as is, competing against the 3000 series of AMD.
It would be awesome, if Intel could make a 25W quad core cpu, paired with an additional 40 watts on atom cores. That's about 20 additional cores, or a 24 core cpu.
abufrejoval - Friday, July 3, 2020 - link
A great article overall, very informative, deeply technical while still readable to a layman, very little judgement or marketing, allowing readers to form their own opinion: Anandtech at its very best!Not mentioned in the article and not covered by the comments so far is that the main driver behind Intel’s low power SoCs has been Apple: This is what Intel thought Apple would want and be happy with!
And if you contrast it to what Apple will now do on their own, that makes me want to sell all my Intel shares: Good thing I never had any.
This is another Intel 80432 or i860, tons of great ideas engineered into parts, but great parts don’t automatically make a convincing whole.
And I simply don’t see them iterate that into many more designs over the next years at competitive prices: With that hot-spot governed layout between the two all the flexibility and cost savings a chiplet design is supposed to deliver goes away and you now have two chips in a very tight symbiosis with no scale-up design benefits.
It’s a Foveros tech demo, but a super expensive one with very little chance of currying favors even at ‘negative revenues’ in the current market.
X86 is not competitive in terms of Watts or transistors required for a given amount of compute. It didn’t matter that much in PCs, the competing servers were much worse for a long time, but in the mobile space, phones to ultrabooks, it seems impossible to match ARM, even if you could rewind the clock by ten years and started to take BIG-little seriously. Lakefield is essentially a case study for Core being too big and thus power hungry and Atom failing on performance.
ISA legacy is still holding x86 from dying completely, but that matters less and less at both the top of the performance range with servers and at the bottom in mobile, where the Linux kernel rules supreme and many userlands and ISAs compile just fine.
Gaming is a hold-out, but perhaps the last generation consoles on x86, gamer PCs alone too much of a niche to determine the future.
The desktop will switch to who offers the bigger, longer lasting bang for the buck and there is a very good chance that will be ARM next.
Microsoft may be allowed to blunder along with lackluster ARM64 support for a couple more days, but Apple’s switch puts them under long deserved pressure. A nice Linux/Android/Chromium hybrid ultrabook running whatever Office could get things moving quicker… at least I hope that, because I’d never want to be forced into the bitten Apple…. by these corporate decision makers I see already twitching.
No chance I’d ever let a new Apple into my home: The ][ was the last good one they made.