The claim of 5% increased efficiency is problematic as it indicates that they upped clocks without a sufficient decline in power.
My bet for next year is a semi-custom A73 , the "Built on ARM Cortex Technology" license. As MTK X30 is in a rush to arrive, it will be interesting to see who is first to market, if the X30 uses A73 or A72 (they need A73) and if Qualcomm uses FO-WLP (X30 doesn't).
The big cores are clocked 9% higher, so that's a *problematic* 4% increase in peak power consumption. The small cores are obviously going to need noticeably more power when under full load. But if the temperature becomes an issue under sustained load (gaming on all cores?) the chip can be clocked down to ~5% higher speed than SD820 and nothing is lost while peak performance is gained. Rest assured they would have liked to improve the power efficiency more, but they're not magicians. SD821 looks like simply stricter binned SD820, and hence didn't cost much to create.
The 820 was already clocked too high and the power increase with clocks is not linear.
They push clocks too far to keep up with the competition in burst perf as A72 is substantially better. That's a problem as you don't get what you think you are getting and they provide no info on this Turbo mode and sustained perf.
Fair question. Based on burst perf vs sustained perf and the competition. I guess anything that is not sustainable long term and not fully detailed is too high. SoC makers and device makers should be forced to disclose "base clocks" and "boost clocks" and how it all works. Review sites could easily fully load 1, 2,3, 4 cores and provide a much clearer picture about sustained perf for each device. AT has been promising a proper SD820 review for 6 months now and in their average reviews they don't include any kind of CPU tests ( PCMark and Diiscomark are very software dependent and Java perf is not representative for a CPU's perf) and no data on sustained CPU perf . SD820 can't even fully load the 2 high clocks cores for long. Ofc there are substantial differences between devices. The worst i've seen might be the Zuk , thin body and glass back are a problem.
If the peak performance was identical to the sustained performance, I'd say that the device is badly designed for general usage, i.e. it leaves responsiveness on the table by not boosting higher. But that's not what you're talking about. If the device vendors would switch from advertising max clock speeds to "base clock and typical boost clock", like nVidia does it, that would be a lot more useful and less misleading. There'd be debate over what "typical useage" is, but that's pretty much inevitable.
@ MrSpadge That's why base clocks should be what can be sustained long term. As for turbo or boost or w/e term one uses, there should be sufficient details. At least Intel provides some details on Turbo,when it comes to phones nobody provides info and review sites don't try much either. In phones there is more than TDP to factor in too. Peak perf is limited by that but you also care about battery life. One needs to find a balance between perf and efficiency. The Exynos does better in that area if you compare the SD820 and Exynos 8890 versions of the S7.
Using real world apps to test if a SoC is pushed too far and if power management does is job well would be good too as synthetic might or might not fit a real world scenario.
What Intel says is becoming ever less useful every iteration. Kaby Lake 4.5W has a frequency range from around 1 to 3GHz, and who knows what you'll get in that range? It depends on skin temperature, whether the device is vertical or horizontal, how active the radios are, etc.
The point is --- when Intel was selling something that ran at, say 2GHz, turboing up to 2.2, that was an informative speed range. When the range is 1 to 3GHz, don't tell me that's more informative than QC's 2.34 GHz. Both are not especially helpful, but QC's seems mildly more helpful. And in both cases, you can only get a real feel for performance once you see the benchmarks in REAL systems.
Intels statement is more useful. QCs "2.34 GHz" would be equivalent to Intel specifying the Kaby 4.5 W i7 as "3.6 GHz". But the fact that its base clock is much lower than for the 15 W models, by about a factor of 2, gives you a feeling for the difference in sustained performance between those chips.
@ name99 Yes Intel overcomplicated it and it becomes difficult to figure it out but at least they provide some info, they don't pretend it's not there.never said that Intel does it well, just that they, at least, provide some info. In phones there is no info at all, SOC makers just list peak clocks and that's it. In PC the testing is also far more relevant,in phone it's all synthetic and the user gets almost no valid data points, besides burst perf ranking.
Isn't power increase from clock increase linear? I thought it was voltage increases that were non-linear. Obviously, you often need higher voltages to get to those higher clocks, but it's sometimes possible to just increase clocks.
I think he was implying a voltage increase. Apart from that there's a minor non-linearity from the higher temperature which the higher power draw at higher clock speeds causes, but this can easily be neglected when talking about a few percent clock speed differences.
We'll see if it's MP8 at moderate clocks or MP6. MP8 at moderate clocks would be great and hopefully avoid heavy throttling. It can't be on 10nm due to timing so MP8 would be just right and A73 at 2.6GHz on 16ff would fit what we know about A73.
Intel seems to have squeezed around 12% performance improvement from their 14nm optimization at more or less equal power. One suspects the same holds for TSMC's improvement from 16nmFF to 16nmFF+. Obviously none of us know the details, but the Intel number likely results from not just frequency improvements but also some compensating power management improvements. QC has done much less to tweak their SoC apart from just "re-compiling" it for the new process, so we'd expect less benefit this round.
More interesting is what Apple will manage to do with the same process improvement. The same order of frequency boosting would get us to something like [email protected] and [email protected]. If they throw in 15% or so micro-architecture improvements, then we get an overall boost of around 25%, which is very much analogous to the A7->A8 transition. And presumably Apple have enough manpower and time that they will also boost their power management somewhat, giving us those improvements with no real drop in efficiency and, I would assume, like the A9 the ability to maintain that performance (mostly) even under extreme long-duration conditions. (At some point I expect Apple will run out of other knobs to tweak, and will move to the Intel "ramp up performance into fireball mode for a few seconds to maintain short bursts of interactivity" but they seem unwilling to do that yet.)
Looks like the little cores are getting the larger bump in clocks. Most modern OEM optimizations for Android revolve around routing as much UI and scrolling workloads to the little cores to save power. Kind of explains their claims of better UI and smoother scrolling.
Big cores are already fast enough, what we now need is even better performance and efficiency in the little cores. I'm looking at you Sammy; either ramp up the small cores to full speed when my finger touches the screen, or schedule the entire foreground application to a big core or two at lower clocks (keeping the little cores for background processes, don't care if those slow down).
I am. The SD808 and SD810 ruined most 2015 flagship devices. As is Apple needed a larger SoC lead... Assuming the 2016 Nexuses will use SD821, they should be in decent shape. Still, this is an iteration is an SoC that should have shipped last year to be competitive...
It will only be brought if they choose to. The 820 can be low power at the expense of lower perdormance. Apple's chips work well because they use larger die sizes to improve performance . Consider that Apple's chips are larger than Intel's Core Ms which scales from 4.5w to 15w.
Core m uses the exact same die as the regular COre i line dual-cores -- so the same as the i3's. I think those go up to 65w, so that's the same die from 4.5w to 65w.
Shoot me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Intel have the most advanced FinFET tech known to man?
And if so, why have their mobile efforts largly been in vain?
PS: A friend did have an Asus (Acer?) large phone a year or so ago with an Intel Atom, and it seemed fine to me, even if the device did seem pretty 'mid-range'.
Their chips were fine just that x86 really having issues with Android, that's probably why Intel is getting a license from ARM for ARM chip manufacturering.
Because they dont want to sell the Core Ms as a mobile cpu, which is lower in price. This is the reason they kept using the smaller chip Atoms to compete with Arm devixes.
-"doesn't Intel have the most advanced FinFET tech known to man?" That's what everyone wants to believe, but it's not necessarily the case.
-"why have their mobile efforts largly been in vain?" Atom in mobile primarily failed because of Qualcomm in particular, not ARM in general. Intel didn't do much to differentiate and/or they offered too little, too late. In the high-end OEMs prefer in-house chips (Apple, Samsung and now, Huawei). Low end mobile SoCs have become a commodity, not primarily to generate profit, but to keep the fabs up and running. The extra work for Android x86 optimization wasn't worth the effort, even though Android's UI works really well with Intel CPUs since Android's (hybrid) hardware acceleration is very CPU bound unlike iOS and Windows Mobile.
Looks like Intel has concluded that straight up licensing ARM designs is a better means to keep their fabs in production until..... whatever they have up their sleeves.
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jjj - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
The claim of 5% increased efficiency is problematic as it indicates that they upped clocks without a sufficient decline in power.My bet for next year is a semi-custom A73 , the "Built on ARM Cortex Technology" license.
As MTK X30 is in a rush to arrive, it will be interesting to see who is first to market, if the X30 uses A73 or A72 (they need A73) and if Qualcomm uses FO-WLP (X30 doesn't).
But before all that, hopefully we see Kirin very very soon with A73 at 2.6GHz and 2x their current GPU perf, on 16ff ofc. https://gfxbench.com/resultdetails.jsp?resultid=4x...
MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
The big cores are clocked 9% higher, so that's a *problematic* 4% increase in peak power consumption. The small cores are obviously going to need noticeably more power when under full load. But if the temperature becomes an issue under sustained load (gaming on all cores?) the chip can be clocked down to ~5% higher speed than SD820 and nothing is lost while peak performance is gained. Rest assured they would have liked to improve the power efficiency more, but they're not magicians. SD821 looks like simply stricter binned SD820, and hence didn't cost much to create.jjj - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
The 820 was already clocked too high and the power increase with clocks is not linear.They push clocks too far to keep up with the competition in burst perf as A72 is substantially better. That's a problem as you don't get what you think you are getting and they provide no info on this Turbo mode and sustained perf.
MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
How do you judge that SD820 is clocked "too high"?jjj - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Fair question.Based on burst perf vs sustained perf and the competition.
I guess anything that is not sustainable long term and not fully detailed is too high.
SoC makers and device makers should be forced to disclose "base clocks" and "boost clocks" and how it all works.
Review sites could easily fully load 1, 2,3, 4 cores and provide a much clearer picture about sustained perf for each device.
AT has been promising a proper SD820 review for 6 months now and in their average reviews they don't include any kind of CPU tests ( PCMark and Diiscomark are very software dependent and Java perf is not representative for a CPU's perf) and no data on sustained CPU perf .
SD820 can't even fully load the 2 high clocks cores for long. Ofc there are substantial differences between devices. The worst i've seen might be the Zuk , thin body and glass back are a problem.
MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
If the peak performance was identical to the sustained performance, I'd say that the device is badly designed for general usage, i.e. it leaves responsiveness on the table by not boosting higher. But that's not what you're talking about. If the device vendors would switch from advertising max clock speeds to "base clock and typical boost clock", like nVidia does it, that would be a lot more useful and less misleading. There'd be debate over what "typical useage" is, but that's pretty much inevitable.jjj - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
@ MrSpadgeThat's why base clocks should be what can be sustained long term.
As for turbo or boost or w/e term one uses, there should be sufficient details.
At least Intel provides some details on Turbo,when it comes to phones nobody provides info and review sites don't try much either.
In phones there is more than TDP to factor in too. Peak perf is limited by that but you also care about battery life. One needs to find a balance between perf and efficiency. The Exynos does better in that area if you compare the SD820 and Exynos 8890 versions of the S7.
Using real world apps to test if a SoC is pushed too far and if power management does is job well would be good too as synthetic might or might not fit a real world scenario.
name99 - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
What Intel says is becoming ever less useful every iteration. Kaby Lake 4.5W has a frequency range from around 1 to 3GHz, and who knows what you'll get in that range? It depends on skin temperature, whether the device is vertical or horizontal, how active the radios are, etc.The point is --- when Intel was selling something that ran at, say 2GHz, turboing up to 2.2, that was an informative speed range. When the range is 1 to 3GHz, don't tell me that's more informative than QC's 2.34 GHz. Both are not especially helpful, but QC's seems mildly more helpful. And in both cases, you can only get a real feel for performance once you see the benchmarks in REAL systems.
MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Intels statement is more useful. QCs "2.34 GHz" would be equivalent to Intel specifying the Kaby 4.5 W i7 as "3.6 GHz". But the fact that its base clock is much lower than for the 15 W models, by about a factor of 2, gives you a feeling for the difference in sustained performance between those chips.jjj - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
@ name99Yes Intel overcomplicated it and it becomes difficult to figure it out but at least they provide some info, they don't pretend it's not there.never said that Intel does it well, just that they, at least, provide some info.
In phones there is no info at all, SOC makers just list peak clocks and that's it.
In PC the testing is also far more relevant,in phone it's all synthetic and the user gets almost no valid data points, besides burst perf ranking.
MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Valid points!ImSpartacus - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Isn't power increase from clock increase linear? I thought it was voltage increases that were non-linear. Obviously, you often need higher voltages to get to those higher clocks, but it's sometimes possible to just increase clocks.MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
I think he was implying a voltage increase. Apart from that there's a minor non-linearity from the higher temperature which the higher power draw at higher clock speeds causes, but this can easily be neglected when talking about a few percent clock speed differences.Slap_and_Tickle - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
The power increase with clocks is almost never linear at the top speeds because a voltage increase is required.TylerGrunter - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Is the link supposed to be of the new Kirin? Because the results are the same as the old Kirin 950. So any hope for 2x their current GPU performance is lost.https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx40&am...
jjj - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Car chase 11.7 vs 6.3 FPSManhattan 3.1 20.1 vs 10.4
jjj - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
We'll see if it's MP8 at moderate clocks or MP6. MP8 at moderate clocks would be great and hopefully avoid heavy throttling.It can't be on 10nm due to timing so MP8 would be just right and A73 at 2.6GHz on 16ff would fit what we know about A73.
name99 - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Intel seems to have squeezed around 12% performance improvement from their 14nm optimization at more or less equal power. One suspects the same holds for TSMC's improvement from 16nmFF to 16nmFF+. Obviously none of us know the details, but the Intel number likely results from not just frequency improvements but also some compensating power management improvements. QC has done much less to tweak their SoC apart from just "re-compiling" it for the new process, so we'd expect less benefit this round.More interesting is what Apple will manage to do with the same process improvement. The same order of frequency boosting would get us to something like [email protected] and [email protected]. If they throw in 15% or so micro-architecture improvements, then we get an overall boost of around 25%, which is very much analogous to the A7->A8 transition. And presumably Apple have enough manpower and time that they will also boost their power management somewhat, giving us those improvements with no real drop in efficiency and, I would assume, like the A9 the ability to maintain that performance (mostly) even under extreme long-duration conditions. (At some point I expect Apple will run out of other knobs to tweak, and will move to the Intel "ramp up performance into fireball mode for a few seconds to maintain short bursts of interactivity" but they seem unwilling to do that yet.)
name99 - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
semiaccurate suggestshttp://semiaccurate.com/2016/08/31/qualcomm-outs-b...
what I assumed as well --- the process improvements give BOTH 9% speed boost AND 5% reduced power, not either/or.
lilmoe - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Looks like the little cores are getting the larger bump in clocks. Most modern OEM optimizations for Android revolve around routing as much UI and scrolling workloads to the little cores to save power. Kind of explains their claims of better UI and smoother scrolling.Big cores are already fast enough, what we now need is even better performance and efficiency in the little cores. I'm looking at you Sammy; either ramp up the small cores to full speed when my finger touches the screen, or schedule the entire foreground application to a big core or two at lower clocks (keeping the little cores for background processes, don't care if those slow down).
Ironchef3500 - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Any chance for this in the new nexus phones?Endda - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Rumors seem to indicate they will beGasaraki88 - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
The SDs are getting too hot and power hungry. It's time for another vendor to step up to the plate and bring the heat down and performance up.MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Still grumpy because of the 1st version of SD810?syxbit - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
I am. The SD808 and SD810 ruined most 2015 flagship devices. As is Apple needed a larger SoC lead... Assuming the 2016 Nexuses will use SD821, they should be in decent shape. Still, this is an iteration is an SoC that should have shipped last year to be competitive...zodiacfml - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
It will only be brought if they choose to. The 820 can be low power at the expense of lower perdormance. Apple's chips work well because they use larger die sizes to improve performance . Consider that Apple's chips are larger than Intel's Core Ms which scales from 4.5w to 15w.extide - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
Core m uses the exact same die as the regular COre i line dual-cores -- so the same as the i3's. I think those go up to 65w, so that's the same die from 4.5w to 65w.zeeBomb - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
New Nexuses and the V20? But I hope this a good follow-up to the 801.Notmyusualid - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Open Question:Shoot me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Intel have the most advanced FinFET tech known to man?
And if so, why have their mobile efforts largly been in vain?
PS: A friend did have an Asus (Acer?) large phone a year or so ago with an Intel Atom, and it seemed fine to me, even if the device did seem pretty 'mid-range'.
Gordonium - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
I think they do.Their chips were fine just that x86 really having issues with Android, that's probably why Intel is getting a license from ARM for ARM chip manufacturering.
And it's Asus.
zodiacfml - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
Because they dont want to sell the Core Ms as a mobile cpu, which is lower in price.This is the reason they kept using the smaller chip Atoms to compete with Arm devixes.
lilmoe - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
-"doesn't Intel have the most advanced FinFET tech known to man?"That's what everyone wants to believe, but it's not necessarily the case.
-"why have their mobile efforts largly been in vain?"
Atom in mobile primarily failed because of Qualcomm in particular, not ARM in general. Intel didn't do much to differentiate and/or they offered too little, too late. In the high-end OEMs prefer in-house chips (Apple, Samsung and now, Huawei). Low end mobile SoCs have become a commodity, not primarily to generate profit, but to keep the fabs up and running. The extra work for Android x86 optimization wasn't worth the effort, even though Android's UI works really well with Intel CPUs since Android's (hybrid) hardware acceleration is very CPU bound unlike iOS and Windows Mobile.
Looks like Intel has concluded that straight up licensing ARM designs is a better means to keep their fabs in production until..... whatever they have up their sleeves.