While Qualcomm had been the dominating force in ARM market for some time now, this past week established Apple as a competent SoC designer, while proving that Intel can outclass ARM and its partner if it has to.
Intel has had multiple CPU and SoC announcements in September, initially with the Ivy Bridge based Extreme Edition Core i7s and complementary Xeon processors, and now during the Intel Develop-ment Forum with Bay Trail and Quark SoCs.
I remember when I heard Intel CEO Brian Krzanich talk about his company get into the wearable device market; I started wondering, what they’d call the SoCs inside. They had Atom, so would those be called Electron? Intel (thankfully) came with the name: Quark.
Quark is a semi-open platform that’ll allow other companies to add their IPs. Quark will be x86 based, and ISA compatible with the Pentium processors. The Quark’s CPU cores are tiny, only about 1/5th of a Silver-mont core and consume a tiny 100mW of power.
Intel’s Atoms have finally received the overhaul we’ve been waiting for, and Bay Trail is the code name for the Atoms built with 4 Silvermont cores. The Atom Z3770’s CPU performance outclasses ARM-based SoCs like the Tegra 4, Snapdragon 800 and Apple A6X.
On the GPU side, however, the A4-5000 decimates the Z3770, whose GPU performance is closer to the iPad 4’s A6X (which uses a PowerVR SGX 554MP4 as its GPU). Finally Intel demonstrated a working Broadwell chip. Built using a 14-nm manufacturing process, Broadwell is a Haswell die shrink that’ll release for notebooks and AiOs next year. At full load, the lowest power implementation of Broadwell appeared to consume 30% lower power than its current generation Haswell counterpart.
While 64-bit processors aren’t news in the PC space, both Bay Trail and the new Apple A7 join AMD’s Jaguar based Temash as 64-bit SoCs targeted at the smartphone and tablet space.
This brings me to Apple, which can brag about implementing ARM’s 64-bit capable ARMv8 architecture a whole year before ARM itself intends to. Apple claims that the A7 doubles performance over the iPhone 5’s A6, though we’ll have to wait for the iPhone 5S to be released to confirm that.
Apple’s also thrown in an M7 co-processor that’ll take care of sensor data and off-load other specific tasks from the main CPU cores. I came across interesting forum speculation on the Internet that suggested that the M7 could end up as a standalone processor for the roumered iWatch, and I think that line of thought could hold significant merit.
While 64-bit SoCs are indeed exciting, the real benefit of 64-bit hardware will only be realised when devices exceed 4GB of RAM and when software is ready to take advantage of that. While Windows 8 with Connected Standby is only available in a 32-bit form, a 64-bit implementation shouldn’t be too far away. iOS is exclusive to Apple’s own devices, so I expect iOS 7 to be a 64-bit environment on the iPhone 5S, and eventually the iPad 5. 64-bit Android is likely much farther away, we’ll probably see something on that front in 2015.