The x86 Power Myth Busted: In-Depth Clover Trail Power Analysis
The untold story of Intel's desktop (and notebook) CPU dominance after 2006 has nothing to do with novel new approaches to chip design or spending billions on keeping its army of fabs up to date. While both of those are critical components to the formula, its Intel's internal performance modeling team that plays a major role in providing targets for both the architects and fab engineers to hit. After losing face (and sales) to AMD's Athlon 64 in the early 2000s, Intel adopted a "no more surprises" policy. Intel would never again be caught off guard by a performance upset.
Over the past few years however the focus of meaningful performance has shifted. Just as important as absolute performance, is power consumption. Intel has been going through a slow waking up process over the past few years as it's been adapting to the new ultra mobile world. One of the first things to change however was the scope and focus of its internal performance modeling. User experience (quantified through high speed cameras mapping frame rates to user survey data) and power efficiency are now both incorporated into all architecture targets going forward. Building its next-generation CPU cores no longer means picking a SPECCPU performance target and working towards it, but delivering a certain user experience as well.
Intel's role in the industry has started to change. It worked very closely with Acer on bringing the W510, W700 and S7 to market. With Haswell, Intel will work even closer with its partners - going as far as to specify other, non-Intel components on the motherboard in pursuit of ultimate battery life. The pieces are beginning to fall into place, and if all goes according to Intel's plan we should start to see the fruits of its labor next year. The goal is to bring Core down to very low power levels, and to take Atom even lower. Don't underestimate the significance of Intel's 10W Ivy Bridge announcement. Although desktop and mobile Haswell will appear in mid to late Q2-2013, the exciting ultra mobile parts won't arrive until Q3. Intel's 10W Ivy Bridge will be responsible for at least bringing some more exciting form factors to market between now and then. While we're not exactly at Core-in-an-iPad level of integration, we are getting very close.
To kick off what is bound to be an exciting year, Intel made a couple of stops around the country showing off that even its existing architectures ...