The ARM vs x86 Wars Have Begun: In-Depth Power Analysis of Atom, Krait & Cortex A15
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 4, 2013 7:32 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Intel
- Samsung
- Arm
- Cortex A15
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- SoCs
Cortex A15: Kraken
While SunSpider wasn't a great performance target for Exynos 5250, Kraken is a different story entirely. The Cortex A15s complete the task significantly quicker than the competition, and as a result achieve competitive energy usage although at significantly higher peak power consumption.
Despite the high peak power consumption of the Nexus 10 and its Cortex A15s, total energy usage is the lowest out of any of the contenders here since the Exynos 5250 is able to complete the benchmark so quickly. Intel is up next, followed by Qualcomm.
Once again we're seeing peak CPU power usage of ~3W, compared to < 1.5W for the competition. The performance advantage is enough to justify the added power, however in devices that simply can't dissipate this much heat (e.g. smartphones) I wonder what will happen.
Isolate the CPU cores themselves and the race is much closer, this time with Qualcomm taking the lead.
When mostly idle, the Mali-T604 on Samsung's 32nm LP (HK+MG) process barely sips power.
Kraken - Max, Avg, Min Power
Average Power Draw
Minimum Power Draw
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
140 Comments
View All Comments
kumar0us - Friday, January 4, 2013 - link
My point was that for a CPU benchmark say Sunspider, the code generated by x86 compilers would be better than ARM compilers.Could better compilers available for x86 platform be a (partial) reason for faster performance of intel. Or compilers for ARM platform are mature and fast enough that this angle could be discarded?
iwod - Friday, January 4, 2013 - link
Yes, not just compiler but general optimization in software on x86. Which is giving some advantage on Intel's side. However with the recent surge of ARM platform and software running on it my ( wild ) guess is that this is less then 5% in the best case scenario. And it is only the worst case, or individual cases like SunSpider not running fully well.jwcalla - Friday, January 4, 2013 - link
Yes. And it was a breath of fresh air to see Anand mention that in the article.Look at, e.g., the difference in SunSpider benchmarks between the iPad and Nexus 10. Completely different compilers and completely different software. As the SunSpider website indicates, the benchmark is designed to compare browsers on the same system, not across different systems.
monstercameron - Friday, January 4, 2013 - link
it would be interesting to throw an amd system into the benchmarking, maybe the current z-01 or the upcoming z-60...silverblue - Friday, January 4, 2013 - link
AMD has thrown a hefty GPU on die, which, coupled with the 40nm process, isn't going to help with power consumption whatsoever. The FCH is also separate as opposed to being on-die, and AMD tablets seem to be thicker than the competition.AMD really needs Jaguar and its derivatives and now. A dual core model with a simple 40-shader GPU might be a competitive part, though I'm always hearing about the top-end models which really aren't aimed at this market. Perhaps AMD will use some common sense and go for small, volume parts over the larger, higher performance offerings, and actually get themselves into this market.
BenSkywalker - Friday, January 4, 2013 - link
There is an AMD design in their, Qualcomm's part.A D R E N O
R A D E O N
Not a coincidence, Qualcomm bought AMD's ultra portable division off from them for $65 million a few years back.
Anand- If this is supposed to be a CPU comparison, why go overboard with the terrible browser benchmarks? Based on numbers you have provided, Tegra 3 as a generic example is 100% faster under Android then WinRT depending on the bench you are running. If this was an article about how the OSs handle power tasks I would say that is reasonable, but given that you are presenting this as a processor architecture article I would think that you would want to use the OS that works best with each platform.
powerarmour - Friday, January 4, 2013 - link
Agreed, those browser benchmarks seem a pretty poor way to test general CPU performance, in fact browser benchmarks in general just test how optimized a particular browser is on a particular OS mainly.In fact I can beat most of those results with a lowly dual-A9 Galaxy Nexus smartphone running Android 4.2.1!
Pino - Friday, January 4, 2013 - link
I remember AMD having a dual core APU (Ontario) with a 9W TDP, on a 40nm process, back in 2010.They should invest on a SOC
kyuu - Friday, January 4, 2013 - link
That's what Temash is going to be. They just need to get it on the market and into products sooner rather than later.jemima puddle-duck - Friday, January 4, 2013 - link
Impressive though all this engineering is, in the real world what is the unique selling point for this? Normal people (not solipsistic geeks) don't care what's inside their phone, and the promise of their new phone being slighty faster than another phone is irrelevant. And for manufacturers, why ditch decades of ARM knowledge to lock yourself into one supplier. The only differentiator is cost, and I don't see Intel undercutting ARM any time soon.The only metric that matters is whether normal human beings get any value from it. This just seems like (indirect) marketing by Intel for a chip that has no raison d'etre. I'm hearing lots of "What" here, but no "Why". This is the analysis I'm interested in.
All that said, great article :)