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Comment by ricw | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how the focus has shifted from performance / frequency to power consumption. I guess Intel is starting to get a bit of a scare of ARM's impending Cortex-A15 attack on the laptop space..

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I think it's more that the "mainstream" computing has moved on from desktops to laptops.

Instead of targeting the latest and greatest design at 130W/90W TDP desktop parts and downsizing it to a laptop, they've turned it around and is starting to target 35W TDP as their main platform, then upping the power to turn it into a desktop part.

Since power consumption and heat dissipation is becoming an issue also at their top-of-the-line server market, it probably makes much more sense to design things that way. My guess is that high density server design at this point has more in common with laptop-esque power and heat constraints than those of, say, high-end workstations.

I hope that once we have quad core 2.5 Ghz Cortex A15 chips (probably next year), ARM will also start focusing on lowering power consumption after that, or at least split the product line in 2: one that continues to double up the performance every year, while maintaining the same TDP, like they do now, and one where they maintain the performance, but cut the power consumption in half every year.

That kind of performance should be more than enough for smartphones, and probably even tablets, though I could see how we might need more on clamshells. But by having a product line that focuses on lowering power consumption every year, while maintaining the performance will also ensure Intel will never catch-up with them in chips with extremely low energy consumption, and in the same time our smartphones will start lasting more and more.

ARM already has that strategy in place. They don't stop licensing the A8 core when the A9 MPCore hits the market. They're perfectly willing to let you produce an A8 on 22nm silicon if that's what provides the power/performance balance you want. You should take a look at the full list of cores offered by ARM; there's a lot you won't have heard of if you only pay attention to the flagship phones and tablets.

", or at least split the product line in 2: one that continues to double up the performance every year, while maintaining the same TDP, like they do now, and one where they maintain the performance, but cut the power consumption in half every year."

That is more of a tactic than a strategy. After 3-odd years, there would be a 10 times performance difference between the 'fast' and the 'cool' lines. Chances are there is room between them.

Also, I think is more economical to produce old designs at new technologies for the 'cool' line than to design new 'cool' chips from scratch. That would likely get you 90% of the goal for 10% of the costs.

That 90% probably is sufficient, too, as CPU power usage typically is only a fraction of system power usage. I think that applies even to most embedded stuff for which an ARM is appropriate (ignoring on-chip audio and video decoding hardware)

It's not just ARM. Power and cooling costs in server rooms and data centers is a huge consideration, and Intel has to respond to the needs of those customers as well.

I think Intel realized at the end of Netburst era that pushing 150+W of power through small piece of silicon is not trivial anymore. So to have better performance they were forced to improve perf/watt, and that is exactly what they have done since.

Definitely: for at least half a decade most of the HPC people I've worked with or for had power and cooling as the primary constraint, not space or budget. Things like switching to centralized DC (vs. in-server power supplies), getting disks out of cluster nodes, etc. but there was an obvious problem when a rack of servers was roughly comparable BTU-wise to a large gas grill running at maximum.

Yeah, buying your hardware is largely a one time capital cost, but power for it and for your cooling is a constant operating cost. Haven't I read somewhere that power is now the largest expense in the lifetime of a "supercomputer"?

Forget operating costs, one major biological research center I knew of hit (IIRC) 20% of their maximum server space before the power company said they'd need to run a new high-voltage line at $$$ and years of delays even if the neighbors didn't kill it. I believe they were able to jump on the lower-power hardware as that market developed but it certainly got a lot of attention in the community.

Wow. I suppose they didn't want to move the bulk of their servers because of their sunk costs in space, security, etc. ... but, yeah, I can see that getting a lot of attention.

And you implicitly bring up a point I've read about, that power and cooling are now the limiting factors in server spaces. Moore's Law plus the even faster doubling of disk platter capacity (as of late I've read it's doubling every year or so) has allowed us to pack rather a lot in rather small spaces.

I think for most any computer that is at constant high CPU utilization power will cost more than the hardware over its lifetime. Unless you have very cheap power.

Remember also how they were burned, so to speak, by their Netburst Pentium 4 etc. "marchitecture"; power consumption can be crippling when you push up the speeds and the article comments on both in one sentence, "Ivy Bridge (IVB) is the first chip to use Intel's 22nm tri-gate transistors, which will help scale frequency and reduce power consumption."

I for one am very happy with the Sandy Bridge CPU speeds and price/preformance.

Yes, quad-core Sandy Bridge is incredible, even on the low-end of the scale with the i52400.

It seems like the power-savings in Ivy Bridge will allow a further transition of this tech down to smaller form-factors.

I wonder if the non-premium laptop space will still remain stuck where it is now though? I'm not sure, 5 years on from 2006, what percentage of consumer laptops are significantly faster in use than my MacBook Core Duo.

The problem with something like non-premium laptops is that cost tends to be the biggest constraint, so they're not going to give you more than the market demands unless that's "free".

But who knows? You can't buy a Sandy Bridge Xeon chip that's less than 3 GHz.... (Although I forget the clock rate of the very low power OEM only part.)

There's some Core 2 Duo-replacements in the 2 core i5s and 7s.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3876/intels-core-2011-mobile-r...

Clocks are 2.2GHz to 2.7GHz, all hyper-threaded. Dual and quad-core.

Quite interesting stuff, though I might be annoyed if I bought an i7 laptop then discovered it wasn't a quad-core.

or the low-end server space or Apple getting grumpy...

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