Intel Pentium Silver CPUs introduced

[Millennium]

even the name 'atom' makes me shudder.

I had an asus transformer chi tablet with keyboard dock which I believe was intel low wattage based and I hardly used it. I think this is a market that still needs 5+ years to make sense. Just use a phone or a laptop meanwhile?

ok that's probably wrong but hell it's 8am I've got my excuses

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

My wife's Hudl 2 is dire, awful battery life and goes into thermal throttling after a few minutes of candy crush. The last generation of Atom chips seem a lot better, but I think that was part of Charlie's dig: Why didn't they compare against the last generation rather than going another generation back to the bad ones? We have a few Atom based devices kicking around the house from the D520 to a Z8350 and I will try not to buy any more as people just seem to work around them rather than with them.

I suspect that is more down to the Hudl2 not having enough cooling?? A family member has a Lenovo Yoga Tab 2 8" and it still seems perfectly fine for general web browsing and Youtube. I think once Intel moved to Silvermont,Atom actually wasn't that bad for light usage since it was an out of order core and the IGP could actually could help with media decoding in a meaningful way,and once they moved to Goldmont which was a "wider" core it actually was quite reasonable.

[gagaga]

These will arrive in the baseline NUC - these make excellent systems for Kodi etc.

A NUC for Kodi? a £20 Android box will do that...

Not on my network it won't. Wouldn't allow anything like that on my private vlan, and anyway anything at that price would choke on my library.

[scaryjim]

My wife's Hudl 2 is dire, awful battery life and goes into thermal throttling after a few minutes of candy crush. The last generation of Atom chips seem a lot better, but I think that was part of Charlie's dig: Why didn't they compare against the last generation rather than going another generation back to the bad ones? ...

Well, the last generation were the same basic microarch, so there wouldn't be an improvement (in much the same way that coffee lake ~~ kaby lake ~~ skylake on the mainstream desktop).

I've got a Toshiba Click Mini, which is a 9" Win 10 tablet with a Bay Trail Z3735, and I've never had any performance issues with it - fine for streaming video, general web/email/office, and some fairly long casual gaming sessions (e.g. Puzzle Quest/Gems of War). I wouldn't want an Atom as my only computing device - it IS a low performance core, after all - but for the vast majority of people they're more than adequate.

[DanceswithUnix]

I suspect that is more down to the Hudl2 not having enough cooling?? A family member has a Lenovo Yoga Tab 2 8" and it still seems perfectly fine for general web browsing and Youtube. I think once Intel moved to Silvermont,Atom actually wasn't that bad for light usage since it was an out of order core and the IGP could actually could help with media decoding in a meaningful way,and once they moved to Goldmont which was a "wider" core it actually was quite reasonable.

From looking it up it seems the Hudl is a Z3735D quad core Silvermont SoC. Cooling? Well it is a tablet so one side is glass and the other side seems to want to cool by turning the user's hand into steam

OFC having the tablet in the official Tesco protective holder probably helps keep the heat in a bit, but no more than any other tablet and I haven't had this problem with them.

Well, the last generation were the same basic microarch, so there wouldn't be an improvement (in much the same way that coffee lake ~~ kaby lake ~~ skylake on the mainstream desktop).

I've got a Toshiba Click Mini, which is a 9" Win 10 tablet with a Bay Trail Z3735, and I've never had any performance issues with it - fine for streaming video, general web/email/office, and some fairly long casual gaming sessions (e.g. Puzzle Quest/Gems of War). I wouldn't want an Atom as my only computing device - it IS a low performance core, after all - but for the vast majority of people they're more than adequate.

Interesting, so that is the same SoC but in a bigger form factor (8" vs 9"). Does that device have a fan or is it tablet style passively cooled?

It might be that you are running Windows vs the Android tablet having to fight the x86 java runtime environment as well.

My daughter's Asus transformer does seem cooler with its Z8350 but I don't know how much of that is down to the newer 14nm vs 22nm SoC and how much is the rest of the platform with a bigger chassis and Windows 10. Also hard to tell when she hardly uses the thing because it doesn't have the grunt to run the packages she uses the desktop for and the things she would run on Android are not available for Windows so it kind of sits there unused.

[scaryjim]

... Interesting, so that is the same SoC but in a bigger form factor (8" vs 9"). Does that device have a fan or is it tablet style passively cooled?

It might be that you are running Windows vs the Android tablet having to fight the x86 java runtime environment as well....

Completely passive. The rear of the case does get a noticeably warm spot when you're taxing the SoC (e.g. playing Gems of War), but it never becomes uncomfortable to hold.

It'd be interesting if running Windows 10 did tax the system less than running Android; but it could just be that it's a better designed device all round - that extra size could easily allow for more robust cooling, and I have no idea who makes/designed the Hudl2, whereas Toshy I've always had a soft spot for in terms of design...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

From looking it up it seems the Hudl is a Z3735D quad core Silvermont SoC. Cooling? Well it is a tablet so one side is glass and the other side seems to want to cool by turning the user's hand into steam

OFC having the tablet in the official Tesco protective holder probably helps keep the heat in a bit, but no more than any other tablet and I haven't had this problem with them.



Interesting, so that is the same SoC but in a bigger form factor (8" vs 9"). Does that device have a fan or is it tablet style passively cooled?

It might be that you are running Windows vs the Android tablet having to fight the x86 java runtime environment as well.

My daughter's Asus transformer does seem cooler with its Z8350 but I don't know how much of that is down to the newer 14nm vs 22nm SoC and how much is the rest of the platform with a bigger chassis and Windows 10. Also hard to tell when she hardly uses the thing because it doesn't have the grunt to run the packages she uses the desktop for and the things she would run on Android are not available for Windows so it kind of sits there unused.

This is the one:

https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/ta...et-2-8-android

8" tablet with a Z3745. Its quite cool to the touch and has been fine for the last few years. Its running Android.

[DanceswithUnix]

Completely passive. The rear of the case does get a noticeably warm spot when you're taxing the SoC (e.g. playing Gems of War), but it never becomes uncomfortable to hold.

It'd be interesting if running Windows 10 did tax the system less than running Android; but it could just be that it's a better designed device all round - that extra size could easily allow for more robust cooling, and I have no idea who makes/designed the Hudl2, whereas Toshy I've always had a soft spot for in terms of design...

Dunno, Hudl 1 was designed by Archos but I don't remember who did the engineering on the Hudl 2; perhaps I never knew.

This is the one:

https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/ta...et-2-8-android

8" tablet with a Z3745. Its quite cool to the touch and has been fine for the last few years. Its running Android.

OK, now that is very interesting. I wonder if it is the Hudl power circuitry or possibly even a cheap battery generating the heat. Or the cpu is just misconfigured.

There does seem to be a lack of devices using Atom cores since Intel stopped giving them away though.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Dunno, Hudl 1 was designed by Archos but I don't remember who did the engineering on the Hudl 2; perhaps I never knew.



OK, now that is very interesting. I wonder if it is the Hudl power circuitry or possibly even a cheap battery generating the heat. Or the cpu is just misconfigured.

There does seem to be a lack of devices using Atom cores since Intel stopped giving them away though.

It could be down to cooling - the Lenovo tablet is reasonably heavy for a smaller tablet.

[Bambooz]

My wife's Hudl 2 is dire, awful battery life and goes into thermal throttling after a few minutes of candy crush.

From looking it up it seems the Hudl is a Z3735D quad core Silvermont SoC. Cooling? Well it is a tablet so one side is glass and the other side seems to want to cool by turning the user's hand into steam

Not exactly a tablet, but I've got a Zotac ZBOX Pico (Pi321), which is a mini PC that's just a bit larger than a pack of cigarettes (look at the ports to get an idea of it's overall size) and uses its pretty hefty center aluminum frame for cooling the Z3735F (4x 1.33GHz).
This thing came with Win 8.1 Bing Edition N (so no multimedia stuff, which is quite ironic given this was amongst other things advertised as a silent media/HTPC) and even though the CPU is 64bit, the OS is 32bit. You can't install a 64bit OS onto it thanks to UEFI limitations.

Back to the point: this thing will boost the CPU speed to ~1.83GHz whenever it can to be even slightly usable and then fall flat on its face by running into the thermal limit.

Having a browser open with 3 tabs hopelessly overtaxes the thing (even with an adblocker filtering most of the crap out) to the point of several second long freezes, and playing a 1080p60 h264 video in fullscreen via MPC-HC will make it run into thermal throttling (PROCHOT 95+°C and down to something between 250-480MHz) after about 15 minutes.
And yes, I've taken it apart and verified that the issue is not bad thermal paste or bad contact between CPU and the alu frame etc.

In the end, this overheating from banal tasks even killed it's 64GB Samsung eMMC "SSD", which is now no longer being detected, turning this thing into a useless brick.


This thing is what made me stop buying (and even just considering) anything Atom, including the rebadged Celeron/Pentium Atoms.

[shaithis]

Not on my network it won't. Wouldn't allow anything like that on my private vlan, and anyway anything at that price would choke on my library.

I have a giant library and the misses android box works fine with it. The server-side software will dictate how much work the android box does.

As for "on your private vlan", if you have a private VLAN that you administer, I'm sure you have the know-how to make sure android isn't rooted and you only installed verified apps, just like you do on any other OS.

[DanceswithUnix]

In the end, this overheating from banal tasks even killed it's 64GB Samsung eMMC "SSD", which is now no longer being detected, turning this thing into a useless brick.

This thing is what made me stop buying (and even just considering) anything Atom, including the rebadged Celeron/Pentium Atoms.

That seems a shame, have you tried this to make make it boot Linux? :

https://liliputing.com/2014/10/run-u...-pc-kinda.html

could turn it into a nice little Minecraft server or something.

[Bambooz]

That seems a shame, have you tried this to make make it boot Linux? :

It doesn't boot at all anymore. It shows the POST and hangs when it's supposed to detect the eMMC/SSD. You can press F2 to enter the BIOS and it'll change from "Press F2 to enter Setup" to "Entering Setup..." but nothing ever happens past that (even with bootable USB sticks plugged in). It's a 159eur paperweight.

[LordRetroGamer]

More details about Intel's Gemini Lake cores here https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/679/g...32-core-model/ Most interesting parts: "While Goldmont Plus did not touch the fetch and decode which are still 3-way, the back-end has been widened to support 4-way allocation and 4-way retirement. In other words, Goldmont Plus has a new peak retirement rate of 4 per cycle.", "The L2 has doubled and the L2 predecode cache which was added in Goldmont has been quadrupled from 16 KiB to 64 KiB. Additionally, there is a new shared instruction and data second-level TLB. The new microarchitecture has had many improvements in the execution units as well. The integer execution cluster (IEC) has been widened to 4 ports with the 4th port having a new dedicated jump execution unit (JEU) which supports faster branch redirections.", "Perhaps the most interesting change is in the floating point divider. The floating point divider has also been upgraded to a fast radix-1024 based design (i.e., 10 bits), improving scalar/packed single, double, and extended precision FP divisions", "With Goldmont Plus, Intel has moved to a quadplex CMP module with 4 MiB of L2 cache. For desktop and embedded processors (e.g., Pentium Silver) this means a single CMP module is used with either 4 active cores or just 2. This is why all the recently launched Gemini Lake parts have 4 MiB of level 2 cache."