Tuesday, October 08, 2013 4:12:11 PM
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/davealtavilla/2013/09/11/intels-bay-trail-impresses-you-wont-have-atom-to-kick-around-anymore/
Intel's Bay Trail Impresses, You Won't Have Atom To Kick Around Anymore
Let’s be candid. Over the years, Intel INTC -1.4%‘s Atom architecture, where it took residence in netbooks, convertibles, or tablets didn’t exactly light up performance metrics or inspire jaw-dropping mobile experiences. Sure, Intel figured out a way to mitigate power consumption but Atom has taken a fair bit of flack for its lack-luster performance, especially in multimedia and graphics. More recently, Intel has been making iterative enhancements to Atom that have realized measurable gains, though only affording performance parity with competitive midrange ARM-based devices from the likes of Qualcomm QCOM -1.17%and Samsung. Intel’s Clover Trail architecture, launched earlier this year, definitely offers a better Windows 8 tablet experience but it didn’t invigorate mobile device manufacturers to invest in Android on X86.
At Intel Developer’s Forum (IDF) in San Francisco this week, the company took the wraps off a new Atom architecture, code named Bay Trail, that just may turn some little green alien heads and it’s definitely a big shot in the arm (no pun intended) for the Windows tablet platform in general. It seems you won’t have Atom to kick around anymore. Bay Trail is what Atom feels like it should have been all along.
Intel Bay Trail Atom Die
Intel Bay Trail Atom Die - 4 Cores, 2MB L2 Cache, DX11 Graphics
Intel’s new Bay Trail architecture in the just-announced Atom Z3000 series of SoCs (System-on-Chip), is based on Intel’s first out of order processor core for Atom. Out of order execution allows for more efficient instruction processing, alleviating idle states. Typically OOE architectures are costly, silicon area-wise but with Intel’s manufacturing prowess and 22nm Tri-Gate 3D silicon technologies, silicon real estate is cheap, relatively speaking of course.
Intel's Bay Trail Atom Z3000
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Dave AltavillaDave Altavilla
Contributor
The Bay Trail Atom Z3000 is a quad-core or dual core architecture that doesn’t offer Intel HyperThreading but instead allows a one-to-one core to thread mapping with out of order execution. Intel has enabled up to 4GB system RAM configurations up to speeds of DDR3-1333. The integrated graphics core on Bay Trail is a derivative of Ivy Bridge, boasting full DX11 compatibility and significantly better performance versus the previous generation Clover Trail PowerVR SGX544/545 graphics core. There are 4 EUs (Execution Units) in Bay Trail’s graphics engine, each capable of 8 threads for a total of 32. Hardware accelerated video encode/decode engines are on board here as well and display support for HDMI 1.4, DP 1.2 and eDP 1.3 is in there, with a max resolution of 2560×1600.
That’s a high level breakdown of the major blocks, though Bay Trail has a lot of additional enhancements in imaging and power saving technologies as well, with aggressive fine-grained clock gating at the functional block level for graphics and CPU core resources. Bay Trail can, like previous generation architectures, burst performance when needed and shut down blocks when idle to conserve battery life. More on that after a quick look at the family tree…
Intel Atom Z3000 Family
As we see here, there are a currently six Bay Trail Atom variants with either 2 or 4-core devices, and varying speeds and feeds for DRAM, as well a display resolution support. It’s clear Intel intends to drive Bay Trail across the spectrum of tablets devices from higher-end detachable hybrids, to 7 and 8-inch ultra-portable slates. Forbes contributor and industry analyst, Pat Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy thinks “Bay Trail is best suited for 10-inch form factors because users will be doing more content creation on them, but that doesn’t make it unsuitable for an 8 inch tablet.”
Performance and Battery Life: King and Queen
I’ll cut to the chase for you here. Intel’s new Bay Trail Atom Z3000 absolutely crushes their previous generation Clover Trail design in terms of performance, no matter how you look at the numbers. Under standard compute workloads, web browsing and the like, Bay Trail clocks in on-par or faster than some of the latest ARM core designs. In graphics and multimedia, testing shows Bay Trail is able to also hang with some of the fastest tablet chips on the market now, though a notch behind NVIDIA’s Tegra 4; which admittedly we’ve only seen higher-clocked variants of with active cooling, versus the passively cooled Intel Bay Trail tablets we’ve had hands-on time with.
Battery life-wise, I think we can expect new Atom Z3000-powered tablets to offer up-time at least on parity with Intel’s previous generation Clover Trail Atom design; perhaps a touch better under light duty workloads and idle states, though the chip is more power hungry if you stress it and tap its extra performance, especially the graphics core. Again, Bay Trail should be market-competitive here.
All told, Intel has teed up Bay Trail quite nicely and the Atom Z3000 series could make for excellent alternative tablet offerings this Q4 shopping season. Windows 8 slates are being queued up now for the new platform and are expected to hit next month, with Android offerings reported soon to follow. Intel’s new Bay Trail Atom family is the proverbial “real deal.” The remaining variables are what manufacturers are going to do with the new Atom and how are those tablet offerings will compete feature-wise with the likes of Apple AAPL -1.28% and the ARM/Android army. We’ll find out soon enough.
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