News - Samsung's 'Exynos 5 Dual' faces-off against Intel's 'Atom N570'

[HEXUS]

Gives the Pineview Atom a jolly good spanking.

Read more.

[Brewster0101]

This is got to be the beginning of the end of Intel's dominance in CPU's.

Samsung and Arm are both quickly catching up with Intel and both offering cheaper and better products. Once these start filtering into the home desktop with OS's that support the architect then I think the consumer is going to rejoice in some cheaper computing.

[sykobee]

I wonder if this will get the "Intel can never do wrong", "Atom will thrash ARM", "ARM is dead", etc people to actually stop and think about what they're writing?

[meandmymouth]

This is pretty exciting. With this kind of performance I can see why AMD is going to start producing ARM-based chips for future Opterons.

Even with all the money and power Intel has, I can't see them being able to scale down the x86 architecture enough to be able to compete with ARM in the phone and tablet market. However, at this rate I can easily see ARM taking some of the laptop and server market off Intel.

[3dcandy]

Samsung appear on a real roll at the moment...

[CampGareth]

What I'd be curious to see is whether this changes Intel's strategy a little, they're good at the high end but not the low, so why are they trying to decrease maximum power draw on CPUs when that's just pushing them away from the area they're good at?

I'm fine with power draw being decreased for general usage, but when I want to play a game or more commonly atm compile things, do a bit of 3D rendering, and convert videos I'd rather have a 130W CPU with roughly double the performance of a 77W one

*edit* I suppose I mean performance per watt is important but I don't want to see these decreasing TDPs, I want to fix them at some level that's reasonable to cool (130W say since heatsinks claim they're good for it) and just get more performance generation after generation

[keithwalton]

I wonder if this will get the "Intel can never do wrong", "Atom will thrash ARM", "ARM is dead", etc people to actually stop and think about what they're writing?

They have some basis as in the mobile space the single core atom's have been showing up A9's by some margin and it was already expected that the A15 will bring the swing back towards arm.
Though this comparison uses a 45nm atom when 22nm ones aren't that far away and contain the first significant architecture update to the atom core.

ARM wont make any headway in the laptop / desktop / server area until there 64 bit chips are out. as the ~3GB ram limitation of 32bit chips will hold them back.

Phones / tablets have been doubling in ram size every year (512mb in 2010, 1gb in 2011 and now we're seeing 2gb devices in 2012) but they're going to hit the wall in 2013.

I do wonder how many of the cpu tests use hardware acceleration from either the cpu (NEON etc) or gpu (flash) which the intel platform doesn't have

[CampGareth]

ARM wont make any headway in the laptop / desktop / server area until there 64 bit chips are out. as the ~3GB ram limitation of 32bit chips will hold them back.

Cortex-A15 includes a boost to 40-bit address space, so 1TB of RAM is the limit for the OS but each thread still has a limit of 4GB, in that respect it's capable of holding its own against desktops

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

They have some basis as in the mobile space the single core atom's have been showing up A9's by some margin and it was already expected that the A15 will bring the swing back towards arm.
Though this comparison uses a 45nm atom when 22nm ones aren't that far away and contain the first significant architecture update to the atom core.

ARM wont make any headway in the laptop / desktop / server area until there 64 bit chips are out. as the ~3GB ram limitation of 32bit chips will hold them back.

Phones / tablets have been doubling in ram size every year (512mb in 2010, 1gb in 2011 and now we're seeing 2gb devices in 2012) but they're going to hit the wall in 2013

The Intel Medfield SOCs are 32NM. Moreover,they have poorer graphics abilities than many of the ARM SOCs they are competing against now,and IIRC consume more power when playing back video and doing many other tasks it seems. ARM based SOCs like the Exynos 4210 also were 45NM too,so many of the comparisons were with Intel having a process node advantage too.

[scaryjim]

... the ~3GB ram limitation of 32bit chips will hold them back. ...

I've yet to see any evidence that 2GB of RAM is a serious bottleneck on a laptop/desktop, let alone the > 3GB a 32bit system can happily address. I'm running 32bit Win 7 on my HTPC and I haven't seen any performance issue at all.

Besides, 64bit ARM chips are scheduled for the next year or so anyway. I can't see 4GB being a massive memory wall in that space of time.

[Scribe]

Let's not forget the ARM chips are significantly cheaper too.

[watercooled]

As above, the 40-bit address space will help. And lets not forget 32-bit Atoms, and N4xx being limited to 2GB RAM.

Also, before it appears as an argument at some point, even AMD/Intel CPUs cannot address the full 64 bits of RAM, not that it matters. I know it's less likely on Hexus, but I think I've seen it posted elsewhere.

[iiee]

What I'd be curious to see is whether this changes Intel's strategy a little, they're good at the high end but not the low, so why are they trying to decrease maximum power draw on CPUs when that's just pushing them away from the area they're good at?

I'm fine with power draw being decreased for general usage, but when I want to play a game or more commonly atm compile things, do a bit of 3D rendering, and convert videos I'd rather have a 130W CPU with roughly double the performance of a 77W one

*edit* I suppose I mean performance per watt is important but I don't want to see these decreasing TDPs, I want to fix them at some level that's reasonable to cool (130W say since heatsinks claim they're good for it) and just get more performance generation after generation

In fairness intel does offer you that option (to a certain extent) with its hex core chips and x79 platform.

Side note: Is that the same campgareth who plays on cpc?

[CampGareth]

In fairness intel does offer you that option (to a certain extent) with its hex core chips and x79 platform.

Side note: Is that the same campgareth who plays on cpc?

</topic>
Their hex core consumer chips are aging a bit, sandybridge based, but now that I look their 130W deca-core server chips are sandybridge based too. Oh well, Intel might be waiting for yields to improve before they bring out 'the big guns'.

Re: your side note, yes What's more I've never met another CampGareth so if you find one, probably me
<topic>

[edzieba]

Note that this Atom is a year and a half old at this point. I'll be interested to see how newer ARM-based chips fare in performance/watt when Haswell ULV and Silvermont arrive.

[shamus087]

Kinda nice to see intel as a underdog for once. Good job Samsung (Now buy AMD and start working on the high end!) Good job ARM. You know ARM totally has to buy AMD, I mean then we'd have AMD/ARM/ATI, with so many A's in their team, is there a way they could lose? We'd have High end GPU's, High end CPU's, Low power CPU's, They'd have all fronts covered. I guess I can only dream.