Speeds and Feeds

Ready for a 250-watt notebook? Intel is helping its OEMs to design such extremes.

A presentation at the Intel Developer Forum last week discussed how to build notebooks around the Core i7-920XM Extreme Edition mobile processor, code-named Clarksfield XE.

It turns out that when I estimated the maximum power consumption of a 920XM-based laptop at 80 watts to 100 watts, I was way off! (A typical notebook, by the way, averages somewhere between 40 and 90 watts.)

My estimate was reasonable for the kind of typical 920XM laptop I had in mind, but Intel showed how to go so far beyond "typical" that the resulting machine could need a 250-watt power brick.

I looked around, and the biggest power adapter I could find belongs to the Dell Alienware M17x, which needs a 210-watt brick. (I trust someone will tell me if there's a bigger one out there somewhere...Just leave a comment below.)

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Intel promotes the Turbo Boost technology in its new Core i7 Mobile processors as a way to adapt to the needs of the software and get more performance from the chip, but this isn't the real reason the technology exists.

The new "Clarksfield" Core i7 Mobile processors introduced at the Intel Developer Forum last week are certainly very impressive. They're huge high-performance quad-core chips with Hyper-Threading, support for two channels of DDR3-1333 DRAM, and an on-die PCI Express controller for the fastest possible connection to discrete graphics chips.

Intel VP Mooly Eden shows off the new Core i7 Mobile processor and its companion I/O controller at the Intel Developer Forum.

(Credit: Intel)

In his IDF session announcing these parts, Intel Vice President Mooly Eden said the best of these parts, the 2GHz Core i7-920XM Extreme Edition, is "the fastest quad-core processor, the fastest dual-core processor, and the fastest single-core processor"-- all in one chip.

The key to this dramatic claim is a feature called Turbo Boost technology. Basically, if the current application workload isn't keeping all four cores fully busy and pushing right up against the chip's TDP (Thermal Design Power) limit, Turbo Boost can increase the clock speed of each core individually to get more performance out of the chip.

It's easy to see how this works when just one or two cores are being actively used; whatever power the other two or three cores would have consumed can be redirected over to the active cores, allowing them to run at higher speeds.

The quad-core mode of Turbo Boost is a little more subtle; it works when the four cores aren't running a worst-case workload--for example, integer-heavy processing, since it's generally floating-point calculations that consume the most power--so they aren't bumping into the TDP limit. Turbo Boost can increase the frequency of all four cores until they're running as fast as they can for the current workload.

Eden said that the Turbo Boost controller ... Read more

The mysteries of the Lynnfield and Jasper Forest die photos (from last week's post titled "Investigating Intel's Lynnfield mysteries") were all cleared up at the Intel Developer Forum last week, and as expected, there was nothing sinister going on--just some confusion in Intel's graphics arts department.

With the help of the always-helpful George Alfs of Intel's press relations department and Intel vice president Mooly Eden (general manager of Intel's PC Client Group), we got everything straightened out. Literally!

Here's the die photo of Intel's Lynnfield chip from my previous post:

Die photo of the Core i5/Core i7 processor code-named Lynnfield, with labels.

(Credit: Intel)

This is the newest (shipping) part based on the Nehalem microarchitecture, differing from the earlier Bloomfield by the addition of an on-die PCI Express controller. Both chips are made in Intel's 45nm process technology.

According to Eden, the Lynnfield chip design is shared with several other Intel chips that will be on the market soon, including ... Read more

I have a few questions to ask at this week's Intel Developer Forum....

Why is Intel using a more expensive chip for the new Core i5 and cheaper Core i7 processors? Why does this new chip--code-named Lynnfield--appear to have features Intel isn't using? What's the connection between Lynnfield and a future Intel chip code-named Jasper Forest?

These questions arose as I've been getting ready for IDF by reviewing recent press releases and news stories about Intel's current and forthcoming products, and chatting with fellow analysts about what we're looking forward to seeing there.

The recent announcements of the Core i5 and new Core i7 processors seemed pretty straightforward. Consider Brooke Crothers' piece on CNET: "Out with the old: Intel makes Core 'i' chips cheap." As Crothers explains, the facts are simple: the new Core i7 800-series slots in under the existing 900-series and replaces some older parts. The Core i5 is a new line, clearly positioned below the Core i7. Features, performance, and prices are all lower. That's as it should be.

But in looking at the coverage on some enthusiast sites, a fact jumped out at me. The Lynnfield chip is 12.5 percent larger than the Bloomfield chip used in the higher-priced Core i7 900-series processors (296 square mm vs. 263 square mm), in spite of the fact that Lynnfield only has two memory interfaces and no QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) link.

The big difference between the chips is the addition of 16 lanes of PCI Express on Lynnfield, but that's only about 80 pins plus the control logic. The changes should have roughly canceled each other out. Maybe one chip would be a little bigger than the other, but not by this much.

Much has been made lately about the trend toward solid-state drives. Now a new Intel technology, code-named Braidwood, may delay that trend, blending the performance of solid-state drives with the economy of old-style hard drives.

Braidwood--like its predecessor, Intel's Turbo Memory technology (formerly code-named Robson)--is basically a solid-state cache for all the disks in the system.

I heard about Braidwood earlier this summer on CNET (see "Intel 'Braidwood' chip targets snappier software" by Brooke Crothers). But I shrugged it off, assuming it would be no better than Turbo Memory, which left a bad taste in the mouth of many PC makers, end users, and Microsoft execs. Turbo Memory (and Turbo Memory 2.0) wasn't cheap, and it definitely wasn't worth the cost. The PC industry operates on such slim margins that every dollar's worth of hardware has to earn its keep--and Robson didn't.

But then I read an EE Times article this week by Mark LePedus describing a new report from Jim Handy of analyst firm Objective Analysis.

The 62-page report is titled "Intel's Braidwood: Death to SSDs?"

Handy's report argues persuasively that Braidwood might actually be worthwhile, and that got my attention. I've known him a long time, and he's a very good analyst--he's been covering memory and caching technology a lot longer than I have. He wrote one of the standard references for computer system architects, "The Cache Memory Book."

So I sent Handy a note, and he sent me a copy of the report. And now that I've read it, I'm inclined to agree with his conclusions, assuming the information he's obtained about Braidwood is accurate. It does seem reasonable, at least.

The first thing to understand is why flash memory can be a good disk cache. This boils down to its much faster access times: microseconds, not milliseconds. Flash can actually take much longer to write than a hard disk. But for reads, it's really quick. So if you can be smart about putting the right hard-disk data in the cache, especially by choosing the right time to do those write operations, you can save huge amounts of time on future disk reads.

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I spent Tuesday at Nvidia headquarters, attending the company's annual Analyst Day.

I've been to most of Nvidia's analyst events over the last decade or so, since I covered Nvidia almost from its inception while working as the graphics analyst at Microprocessor Report. These meetings are always a good way to get an update on the company's business operations, and sometimes--like this time--one provides exceptionally good insight into larger industry trends.

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 280 graphics chip

(Credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia has had a rough couple of quarters in the market, which CEO Jen-Hsun Huang blamed in part on a bad strategic call in early 2008: to place orders for large quantities of new chips to be delivered later in the year. When the recession hit, these orders turned into about six months of inventory, much of which simply couldn't be sold at the usual markup.

In response, Nvidia CFO David White outlined measures the company plans to take to increase revenue, sell a more valuable mix of products, reduce the cost of goods sold, and cut back on Nvidia's operating expenses.

Three things stood out for me in this presentation:

Nvidia is planning an aggressive transition to state-of-the-art ASIC fabrication technology at TSMC, the company's manufacturing partner. Within "two to three quarters," White said, about two-thirds of the chips Nvidia sells will be made using 40-nanometer process technology. (The first of these chips were announced Tuesday.)

White also acknowledged something that I've long assumed to be true: Nvidia receives "preferential allocation" on advanced process technology at TSMC. It's logical that Nvidia should get the red-carpet treatment, having been TSMC's best customer for many years, but I don't recall hearing Nvidia or TSMC put this fact on the record before.

The third notable point from White's presentation: the gross margins for Nvidia's Tegra, an ARM-based application processor--which Nvidia's Mike Rayfield, general manager of the Tegra division, says has already garnered 42 design wins at 27 companies--are much higher than I'd have guessed--at "over 45 percent." That's quite excellent for an ARM-based SoC; it's a very competitive market.

More surprises
The technical sessions at the event contained their own surprises.

For example, Nvidia effectively seized control of an old Intel marketing buzzword: "balanced."

For years, Intel used to talk about ... Read more

I honestly don't know whether Om Malik's blog site, GigaOM, is intended to be informative or merely entertaining. I pointed out a previous example of the overwrought rhetoric that permeates that site last September (in the context of Comcast's then-new usage cap policy), but generally, I try to ignore the nonsense there for the same reasons that I ignore talk radio.

But like it or not, GigaOM is widely read, and sometimes when a post there bears directly on a market that's important to me, I can't bear to let it go. This is one of those times.

On Thursday, a GigaOM staffer wrote a piece titled "Can Intel Thrive in a Post x86 World?"

A slide from Fred Weber's keynote presentation at Microprocessor Forum 2003 showing how x86 will evolve into systems from big servers down to handheld consumer devices.

(Credit: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.)

The headline is preposterous from beginning to end. It has two implications just in the eight words of the title: that Intel's ability to "thrive" faces any imminent threats, and that the importance of the x86 architecture is declining.

In January, the same staffer wrote a piece titled "Netbooks and the Death of x86 Computing" which reached the fantastic conclusion that Netbooks would "destroy the hegemony of x86 machines for personal computing."

Well, as I pointed out just a few weeks later (in "The Netbook is dead. Long live the notebook!"), when the Netbook phenomenon ran up against the dominance of Intel and Microsoft in the PC market, it was the Netbook that died instead. Even at a $300 price point, people still want full PC compatibility.

Yes, there are companies like Freescale (the subject of the January post on GigaOM) and Nvidia that are looking to push the ARM architecture into the Netbook space. But that idea never made much sense, and now that Intel and TSMC are working together to get Intel's Atom x86 core into lower-cost SoC (system on chip) products, the ARM architecture will eventually have to retreat into the shrinking niche for supersmall, supercheap phones and consumer electronics gizmos for which x86 compatibility is of negligible value.

See, we learned a long time ago--those of us who cover this industry professionally, not just as a random assignment for some random blog--that the instruction set architecture (ISA), per se, doesn't matter any more.

The choice of ISA was a big deal in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the extra complexity of an x86 instruction decoder was a large fraction of the total complexity of a microprocessor. That's where the conflict between RISC and CISC came from.

But by the turn of the century, ISA complexity was almost a dead issue, and that coffin's final nail was pounded in by the keynote speech of then-Advanced Micro Devices CTO Fred Weber at Microprocessor Forum 2003, an event I had the honor of hosting.

In his talk, "Towards Instruction Set Consolidation," Weber made a simple point: "Technology has passed the point where instruction set costs are at all relevant."

Even then, three generations of process technology ago, the "x86 penalty" was down to a couple square millimeters of silicon. Today, the comparable figure is about 0.25 square millimeters. Not zero, certainly, but not a significant concern for chips that are a hundred times larger.

In short, ARM chips aren't cheaper or more power-efficient because of their instruction sets; they're like that because they're designed to be. And anything that an ARM chip can do to save cost or power can also be done by an x86 chip.

So there can't ever be a time when the world moves beyond x86. That's 1980s thinking, just plain ignorance of what may be the most important trend in the microprocessor industry.

The rest of Thursday's GigaOM post is a hopelessly self-contradictory muddle that fails to reach any clear conclusions. I'll just quote one more line near the end: "But the PC will be just one small (and shrinking) battleground to keep x86 relevant, amid a more mobile, visual, and power-sensitive world."

Current economic woes aside, the PC market is hardly shrinking. You know what's shrinking? The PC! As the PC shrinks, the PC market will grow. The MID (mobile Internet device) market isn't much to speak of right now, for example, but once MID makers figure out what to build, MIDs will become more popular.

And seriously, is anyone really not clear on the fact that the Apple iPhone is a computer? It isn't an embedded system. An embedded system is one in which the presence of a microprocessor is functionally irrelevant to the user. When a gizmo exposes its programmability to the user, it's a computer.

What else is the App Store but the visible manifestation of the iPhone's programmability?

Now, ARM isn't dead yet. The iPhone uses an ARM processor because there's no x86 processor that would work as well in that system. ARM processors will probably see at least two more generations in cell phones just because there's so much ARM-based software out there (including all the software on the App Store).

But somewhere around 2012, we're going to see x86 chips poking into that space. The value of instruction set compatibility with the PC market will persuade developers of new cell phone platforms to go with x86 chips, and eventually even established systems like the iPhone will switch over.

So not only are x86 chips selling into a growing PC market, they'll eventually start eating into ARM's own strongholds. That can't be bad for Intel.

And that's why the GigaOM piece was preposterous.

Don't get me wrong-- I think the Intel-TSMC alliance announced earlier this week is a good thing for both companies.

But the official explanation, that Intel wants TSMC's help to make Atom processor cores more widely available to the industry, just doesn't strike me as a sufficient reason for the deal.

Intel hardly needs TSMC's help to make SoCs (systems on a chip). Intel has been making highly integrated devices for the embedded market, as well as PC chipsets for a long time. It already has enough of the building blocks and enough experienced engineers to make Atom-based SoC products.

And it isn't as if Intel needs better process technology, or more fabrication capacity. Intel already has more of the best fabs in the world than any other company.

What's the one thing TSMC can do that Intel can't? Operate with low gross margins. In its most recent quarter, TSMC's gross margin was only 31.3 percent, while Intel's gross margin is still an industry benchmark at 53 percent. The difference is more than Intel's net profit--that is, if Intel had TSMC's gross margins, it would be losing money.

Low-margin component suppliers are a critical element of the embedded-systems market, which Intel identified as one of its target markets for this deal. Cost is king in consumer electronics, so high-margin suppliers like Intel rarely get a chance to participate.

Similarly, as average PC-selling prices decline, a growing share of the demand for processors and chipsets drops into price ranges in which Intel just can't afford to play.

The TSMC deal is Intel's way of taking a piece of these businesses without spending much money or taking much risk. For example, TSMC is already accustomed to helping its customers make SoCs for embedded systems. Intel could build such a business itself, but not at the margins it's used to.

Intel said in its press release that it will be porting its Atom cores to TSMC's technology. This is the sort of work that can get expensive in engineering time, but it's possible that the work will be made easier by a convergence between TSMC's processes and Intel's.

Last May, Intel agreed to cooperate with TSMC and Samsung in the transition to larger 450-millimeter silicon wafers (a little less than 18 inches across, up from the 12-inch wafers used today).

This doesn't necessarily mean that the three companies will co-develop fully compatible manufacturing processes, but with the 450mm transition being slated for 2012, there's still plenty of time left to drop that other shoe.

Anyway, this new TSMC deal is merely at the earliest official stage. The companies have signed a memorandum of understanding, but they have yet to work out the details. That could take a year, and it could be another year or two before Atom-based chips are ready to start rolling through the TSMC factory.

All in all, Atom SoCs might not become available from TSMC until 2012, at which point, they could, in principle, be made on a common Intel-TSMC process.

Not that Intel would provide its really good process technology to TSMC. In chips, as in other things, quality is expensive. Intel's best process technology, which it uses primarily for microprocessors, is at the leading edge of semiconductor manufacturing, with features such as a metal electrode acting as the transistor's gate, a hafnium-based insulation between the gate and the channel, and strained silicon in the transistor channel itself (where the current flows when the transistor is on). (See this Intel presentation for more details. Incidentally, did Intel ever announce which metal it's using? If so, I can't find it.)

TSMC may not need or want any of these features, and it would make sense for Intel to keep its best process technology to itself, anyway, if only to protect its high profit margins.

Even without a leading-edge process, TSMC can still make good money from Atom-based SoCs in the embedded market. That's enough to justify TSMC's participation in the deal.

But I'm not sure that explains Intel's motivation. Sure, Intel will make money it wouldn't have made otherwise, but it will also have costs it wouldn't have had otherwise. Intel may make a few bucks per chip in intellectual-property licensing fees, and perhaps this could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but that isn't a whole lot of money to a company like Intel, which makes tens of billions of dollars a year in gross revenue.

Why else would Intel be doing this deal?

Well, I think that the chipmaker could be setting itself up to kill off three of its biggest rivals.

There's already an x86 processor company using TSMC to make (some of) its chips: Via Technologies. Via isn't a big player, but it's been a thorn in Intel's side ever since it purchased the x86 processor operations of IDT (WinChip) and National Semiconductor (Cyrix) in 1999.

Via specializes in exactly the kind of processors that Intel can't afford to sell: low-cost, highly efficient designs aimed at low-cost PCs and embedded systems. Today's Atom is better than Via's best chips, but it's also more expensive. A cheaper TSMC-sourced alternative will hurt Via badly.

Most of the same reasoning applies to ARM, which licenses its processor cores to be used in SoCs made at TSMC, among other fabs. That's almost the same business model Intel is adopting with its own TSMC deal.

ARM dominates the market for microprocessors in cell phones. Intel's current Atom processors are too expensive and too power-hungry for that market. But remember, it'll be a couple of years at least before Atom-based chips start shipping from TSMC. The Atom cores of 2011 or 2012 will be more directly competitive with ARM's cores.

So put ARM on the endangered-species list too.

There's one other company that ought to be worried by this deal, and it probably isn't one you'd expect: Nvidia.

Nvidia is generally thought to be TSMC's biggest customer. It doesn't make x86 processors (though there are persistent rumors that the company is developing one), but it does make the ARM-based Tegra family, which would run up against these future Atom chips.

It's Nvidia's graphics chips that I'm worried about, however.

Intel is developing graphics chips of its own under the Larrabee code name. I wrote about Larrabee last August, and it seemed like a bad idea to me at the time. One of my key objections, however, was that graphics chips are inherently a low-margin business due to the strong competition between AMD and Nvidia, and I didn't think that Intel could afford to drag down its margins just to compete in that market.

The TSMC deal changes all that.

Larrabee's cores aren't Atom cores, per se, but they're similar enough that Intel might consider them to be covered by the language in the TSMC partnership announcement. Or if not, agreements can always be expanded later.

Making Larrabee chips at TSMC would solve the margin problem, putting Intel's graphics chips on a level playing field with Nvidia's. Larrabee would still be at a significant disadvantage because its x86-based design isn't as well-suited to graphics acceleration as Nvidia's chips, but Intel has a special ability to sell inferior products along with other chips its customers need--especially processors. That's reportedly how Intel's slow integrated-graphics chipsets ended up in so many systems during the Windows Vista transition, leading to many disappointed customers.

Or it's possible that Intel will not allow the TSMC deal to harm these companies, if only because Intel may still be in court defending itself against AMD's antitrust lawsuit.

But I wouldn't make that assumption, and I bet that ARM, Nvidia, and Via won't either. Intel isn't the only paranoid company in this industry.

I miss the old SGI. Silicon Graphics was widely regarded as the greatest computer company in Silicon Valley back in the 1990s. Sometimes forgotten--but not gone--SGI was one of our greatest success stories and one of our greatest tragedies.

(Credit: Boxx Technologies)

Apple may have had more revenue by virtue of shipping millions of small systems, but SGI's hardware spanned the range from video-game consoles (the Nintendo 64) to workstations to supercomputers. SGI's Unix-based operating system, IRIX, was one of the most sophisticated in the industry.

I used to lust over SGI machines. I'd obsess over lists of used SGI gear, looking for a great deal that would let me have my own IRIX box at home. In 2004, I finally bought an Octane with MXI graphics... but that was years after these machines were effectively obsolete, and I paid less than 0.5% (1/200th!) of the original retail price of the machine.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, SGI was not well managed, losing huge amounts of money because its leaders would not... Read more