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How the SoC Is Displacing the CPU

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Re: How the SoC Is Displacing the CPU

#41

Post by rasz_pl »

petra wrote: post #38
rasz_pl wrote: post #16

Intel biggest inroads in SoC market happened when it was giving away Atoms below cost ($5, Mediatek/Rockchip price point) while losing $3-4 Billion. Year after year since 2013. Their plan for 2016 is selling LTE modems below cost to Apple.

How is it even legal ?

Its totally cool. Learning from Qualcomm experience (milking Chinese companies for IP resulted in $1B penalty hehe) Intel "partnered" with Rockchip and Spreadtrum (read: was forced by Chinese regulators to give away its Atom IP to Rockchip) and "invested" in a bunch of companies, not to mention will spend almost $6B building a fab there.

Re: How the SoC Is Displacing the CPU

#42

Post by e5f34f89 »

rwmj wrote: post #12
sz4kerto wrote: post #9

"Apple A9X SoC offers 64 bit desktop-class computing enabling a handheld tablet to go toe-to-toe with a state-of-the-art laptop CPU from Intel" Yes and no. Most of the innovation in top-end x86 CPUs goes towards multicore and multi-socket scalability. My desktop is almost 10x faster than an A9X -- and nobody manufactures an ARM SoC that has 100 W thermal envelope but delivers the same speed as a Xeon v3. Intel manufa…

nobody manufactures an ARM SoC that has 100 W thermal envelope but delivers the same speed as a Xeon v3 Look at Cavium ThunderX: 48 ARMv8 cores, very high performance, 95W.

The key question is which workloads will actually benefit from many low single-thread performance cores. While there are some where such a node coupled with a GPU compute cluster will probably be the useful but it seems like a vast majority of server deployments just want good single-thread perf with 2 or more hardware threads.

Re: How the SoC Is Displacing the CPU

#43

Post by rwmj »

e5f34f89 wrote: post #42
rwmj wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nobody manufactures an ARM SoC that has 100 W thermal envelope but delivers the same speed as a Xeon v3 Look at Cavium ThunderX: 48 ARMv8 cores, very high performance, 95W.

The key question is which workloads will actually benefit from many low single-thread performance cores. While there are some where such a node coupled with a GPU compute cluster will probably be the useful but it seems like a vast majority of server deployments just want good single-thread perf with 2 or more hardware threads.

Don't necessarily assume that all ARM cores will have low single-thread performance. Especially with 64 bit server-class ARM SoCs, the performance can be rather good.

Re: How the SoC Is Displacing the CPU

#44

Post by rwmj »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #32
rwmj wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nobody manufactures an ARM SoC that has 100 W thermal envelope but delivers the same speed as a Xeon v3 Look at Cavium ThunderX: 48 ARMv8 cores, very high performance, 95W.

there arn't a lot of workloads a laptop is going to care about that utilize 4 cores, let alone 48. Each indivual core is going to be 1/10th the preformance or less of an intel one. It would feel dreadfully slow by comparison.

You won't be running a Cavium part in your laptop, ever. They specialize in parts for enterprise servers and telecoms.

However, my phone has 6 x 64 bit ARMv8 cores.

Re: How the SoC Is Displacing the CPU

#45

Post by sunnyps »

rwmj wrote: post #44
throwaway2048 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there arn't a lot of workloads a laptop is going to care about that utilize 4 cores, let alone 48. Each indivual core is going to be 1/10th the preformance or less of an intel one. It would feel dreadfully slow by comparison.

You won't be running a Cavium part in your laptop, ever. They specialize in parts for enterprise servers and telecoms. However, my phone has 6 x 64 bit ARMv8 cores.

I think you're talking about the Snapdragon 808 which your phone has. That's a big.LITTLE CPU which means that it's meant to use the 4 little cores almost all of the time and use the big cores only when high performance is really required. What I mean to say is that the 4+2/4+4/4+4+4 configurations aren't meant to parallelize across all cores but rather to minimize power consumption.

Re: How the SoC Is Displacing the CPU

#46

Post by sunnyps »

mtgx wrote: post #15
sz4kerto wrote: post #9

"Apple A9X SoC offers 64 bit desktop-class computing enabling a handheld tablet to go toe-to-toe with a state-of-the-art laptop CPU from Intel" Yes and no. Most of the innovation in top-end x86 CPUs goes towards multicore and multi-socket scalability. My desktop is almost 10x faster than an A9X -- and nobody manufactures an ARM SoC that has 100 W thermal envelope but delivers the same speed as a Xeon v3. Intel manufa…

> Intel manufactures different state-of-the-art laptop CPUs. Apple SoCs can compete with the ultra-low voltage Intels, but not with high-end i7 HQ/MQ series. I think his point was that a $15 Apple chip crushes a $150 Intel Core M. Core M chips have extremely little bang/buck value, as do the new "Celerons" and "Pentiums" that are dressed up $110+ Atom chips.

It's funny that the Celerons you call expensive make up for almost all the processors in cheap laptops such as Chromebooks which sell around the $200 price point[1]. Heck I bought one of those Kangaroo portable desktop things[2] last week for $100 which has a dual core Atom.

Now maybe Core M was an especially gimped CPU but it might be a part of Apple's strategy to push users from entry level Macbooks to the iPad Pro. But all of these other devices with Celerons / Atoms are really capable and people use them for actual work instead of using an iPhone/iPad despite what the benchmarks say.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MMLV7VQ [2] http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/26/infocus-kangaroo-pc/

Re: How the SoC Is Displacing the CPU

#47

Post by sunnyps »

mschuster91 wrote: post #6
digi_owl wrote: post #4

One should also note that the x86 platform has taken on some SoC like structures over the years, with AMD as a driving force. For example they lumped the memory controller onto the CPU die with the Athlon 64, and then a GPU on their A series.

Yeah, and the integrated GPUs, at least the entry level ones, do suck. My Acer netbook is barely able to play 360p videos, 720p if you're lucky and 1080p - no hope. My cheap smartphone can play 1080p without a single dropped frame.

I'm guessing YouTube is using VP9 on your netbook which is probably decoded on the CPU because most GPUs don't do VP9 decoding yet. On your smartphone it's probably h264 that's being decoded on the GPU. You can try the h264ify extension[1] to force h264 on your netbook.

[1] https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

Re: How the SoC Is Displacing the CPU

#48

Post by mschuster91 »

raverbashing wrote: post #30
mschuster91 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and the integrated GPUs, at least the entry level ones, do suck. My Acer netbook is barely able to play 360p videos, 720p if you're lucky and 1080p - no hope. My cheap smartphone can play 1080p without a single dropped frame.

There's something seriously wrong with your install to not be able to play 360p videos. Really I would check video drivers, DMA enabled on drives, excess ram or cpu usage by another process(es) My 7 year old notebook (the one I retired already) had absolutely no problem with videos of this size.

The problem with the 360p videos is that Chrome eats up RAM like I drink beer, and add the neccessities of the Windows world like anti-malware software, adblockers, crappy 3G stick software... you get it :/

Re: How the SoC Is Displacing the CPU

#49

Post by rwmj »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #39
raverbashing wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I would like to know how much die space is wasted on IBM PC backwards compatibility crap in Intel systems (think A20, cascading interrupt controllers, 8086 support, legacy boot, etc)

An intel 8088 processor had a 22mm^2 die size at a 3000nm process node size. A modern x86 processor has a ~200mm^2 die size at a 14nm node size, a die size that is 10x larger with features 200x smaller. Even if a modern x86 chip had to put an entire 8088 on die for legacy compatability (which it definitely would not need to) we are talking less than 0.1% of the die space being taken up by legacy features. The idea th…

While you're right that it's not a huge deal, architectural issues are not solved by putting "an entire 8088 on die for legacy compatability" unless you'd want to run the old software at very low speed. Intel solved it with lots of R&D. Their solution involves a layer that translates x86 instructions to native ops[1], plus many little hacks and improvements.

[1] http://www.realworldtech.com/nehalem/5/

Re: How the SoC Is Displacing the CPU

#50

Post by digi_owl »

bch wrote: post #27
digi_owl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://shop.fairphone.com/fairphone2.html#technical-specific... That lists the various bands for the mobile radios.

I saw that, but it's strange that they'd make it w/ a capable quad-band radio and -still- declare it's only designed for Europe. I'm not a cellular expert -- are there other considerations outside the frequencies that it supports ? If not, it seems like a good global phone, no ?

GSM quad band, UMTS and LTE seem Europe only. So getting anything more than EDGE in USA seem out of the question.

In this day and age i suspect finding GSM radios that are not quad band are rare to say the least.

Never mind that this phone is unlikely to ever be sold with a carrier subsidy, as it will be damn hard to lock in something that can have its SoC assembly replaced by removing a few screws (and ship with the required screwdriver).

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