Intel’s Silvermont Architecture Revealed: Getting Serious About Mobile
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 6, 2013 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Silvermont
- SoCs
Final Words
Silvermont really is Intel’s Conroe for the mobile market, but not in the sense that many have been expecting. Given that success in mobile is so closely tied to device wins, Silvermont alone isn’t enough. Unlike Conroe, a very competitive Silvermont won’t change the world overnight. What Silvermont does however is offer a great foundation for Intel going forward. Conroe lead to Penryn, Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and soon, Haswell. It was the platform that Intel could build on regularly by executing on tick-tock. Conroe paved the way for the insane advantage Intel has held onto for the past few years. Silvermont is like Conroe in that it provides that same foundation.
The mobile market is far more competitive than the PC industry was back when Conroe hit. There isn’t just one AMD but many competitors in the SoC space that are already very lean and fast moving. There’s also the fact that Intel doesn’t have tremendous marketshare in ultra mobile. Silvermont may feel a lot like Conroe, but the market it’s competing in is very different. That’s not to say that Intel can’t be successful here; it’s just not going to be easy.
Architecturally Silvermont is very conservative, and that’s not a bad thing. A side effect of not wanting to make Haswell irrelevant by a far lower cost part is the benefit of maintaining power efficiency. Intel joins the ranks of Apple and Qualcomm in intelligently scaling performance while respecting power consumption. Intel’s 22nm process should give Silvermont a lot of runway to use. If it can quickly follow up with 14nm, Silvermont’s power advantage could end up being akin to Conroe’s performance advantage in the mid-2000s.
Even so, Silvermont is long overdue. It’s the first mobile architecture where Intel really prioritized smartphones and tablets, and on paper, it looks very good. Now it’s up to Intel to turn a great architecture into great design wins. From what I’m hearing, we may actually see that happen.
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Hector2 - Friday, May 17, 2013 - link
There are only 3 companies right now left in the world who have the muscle and volume to afford high tech fabs -- Intel, Samsung & TSMC. And Intel has about a 2 year lead. That means not just higher performance and lower power than before, but lower cost. Making the chips smaller multiplies the number of chips on a single, fixed-cost wafer and lowers costs. If the chip area is 1/2, the costs to make it are about 1/2 as well. 22nm tech gives Intel faster chips with less power than their competition. 14nm hits it out of the park.BMNify - Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - link
You're absolutely wrong about "lower cost". x86 requires more die area. The process is more volatile (more failed wafers).If we combine the 2 above factors with better performance, lower power consumption and toss in a lack of experience we get GT3e. A technological marvel that few (OEMs) want.
BMNify - Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - link
Spot on Krysto - It's Intel's process advantage that is shining through. Soon they'll hit the point of diminishing returns and/or the rest of the market will catch up/get close enough. When I see AMD at 32nm (Richland) having lower power draw at idle than Intel at 22nm (Ivy Bridge) I wonder how special their "secret sauce" actually is.How long can Intel loss-lead? Probably as long as Xeon continues to make up for it but ARM is getting into the server market now too (looking forward to AMD and Calexda ARM SoCs for the server market). Should be interesting in 3-5 years
TheinsanegamerN - Monday, August 26, 2013 - link
only issue, though, is when you put that richland chip under load. all of a sudden, intel is using much less power.t.s. - Monday, May 6, 2013 - link
"The mobile market is far more competitive than the PC industry was back when Conroe hit. There isn’t just one AMD, but many competitors in the SoC space that are already very lean fast moving. There’s also the fact that Intel doesn’t have tremendous marketshare in ultra mobile."Well, with their 'strategy' back then when facing AMD (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8047546.stm), they surely'll win. :p
nunomoreira10 - Monday, May 6, 2013 - link
It´s kinda suspicious that there are many comparisons against arm but none against Amd jaguar or even bobcat.jaguar will probably be a much better tablet cpu and gpu, while intel competes on the phone market.
Khato - Monday, May 6, 2013 - link
Which AMD Jaguar/Bobcat SKU runs at 1.5 watts? They aren't included in the comparison because they're a markedly higher power level.nunomoreira10 - Monday, May 6, 2013 - link
they will both be used on fan-less tablet designs...extide - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link
Totally different markets. Jaguar/Bobcat will likely line up next to low end Core/Haswell, not an Atom/SilvermontPenti - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link
Both will sadly be way to underpowered when it comes to the GPU, and that matters greatly on general OS's and applications like running a desktop OS X or Windows (or GNU/Linux) machine. You won't really be able to game on them at all as it's not smartphone games people want to run. GPGPU won't really be fast enough for anything and we talk about ~100-200 GFLOPs GPU-power on the AMD side for what is essentially a full blown computer.Intel is clearly targeting the phone market. Something AMD/ATI divested from years back with their mobile GPU tech going to Qualcomm (Adreno, which isn't Radeon-based) and Broadcom. ATIs/AMDs mobile GPU-tech was before that previously licensed to or used together with the likes of Intel (PXA/XScale – not integrated though), Samsung and Freescale among others. Their technology already is the mainstay of the mobile business and was departed from the company but in effect their technology know how was successful in the market without their leadership so why would they compete with that, of course they wouldn't.
AMD simply has not and will not likely any time soon invest in an alternate route to dominate their own part of the smartphone/ARM-tablet market while Intel has with integrated designs replacing the custom ARMv5TE design. AMD going after ARM-business is different since they will license the core and their manufacturer GloFo already does manufactures and even offers hard macros for ARM-designs that they sell a bunch of to other customers already. It's also going after other embedded fields and the emerging ARM-server/appliance space all without designing custom cores.
While PXA (Intel) was quite successful in the market, moving to x86 and doing away with stuff like ARM-based network processors, raid-processors allows Intel to focus on delivering great support for modern ISA across all sorts of devices, while it didn't make it into phones (until lately) like PXA which continued to power Blackberrys under Marvell, was the main Windows Mobile platform for years after Intels departure and so on it was able to become a multimediaplatform, and a widely adopted chip for embedded use, driving NAS-devices and the like. Thanks to the Intel purchase of Infineons Wireless portfolio including many popular 3G radios/modems and them forming a new wireless division their actual business and sales in the mobile market is also much higher than when they still had their custom PXA/XScale lineup. Plus they couldn't have competed with their XScale lineup without designing new ARM-ISA compatible cores/designs to be able to match Cortex A8, A9, A7, A15, Krait 600 etc. Plus puts them in a much better place to be a wireless/terminal supplier when they can support customers who want advanced wireless modems/baseband, Application processors, bt, wifi etc. While Nvidia will have Tegra 4i with integrated modem AMD couldn't offer anything similar as they have no team capable of producing radio baseband. Having modern compilers and x86-ISA sure makes it convenient now for Intel, as well as integrating their own GPU, just licensing ARM Ltd designs wouldn't have put them in a better position to continue their presence in the mobile field. They have basically developed and scaled their desktop GNU/Linux drivers in the Linux Kernel, added mobile features and so on years before they put the hardware and can leverage that software in mobile platforms (Android) but it makes sense and they don't have to rely on IP cores and third party drivers for graphics with the coming Bay Trail. They couldn't have shared that much tech if they were anything else then x86. Of course AMD won't be in the same place and scaling down a GPU designed for thousands of stream processors and Windows/OS X drivers to put it into phones is not the same. It would be awful if it is just scaled down to fit the power usage, even if Nvidia has kinda custom mobile gpu it's still worse then the competitors which has no presence in desktop computing. Drivers for QNX, Android/Linux, iOS etc is not the same as with Windows either. It takes a long time to start over when they did away with an okay solution (z460), and they haven't but other have and thats fine, there is more competition here then elsewhere. x86 is no stopper for Intel.