Wednesday, December 12th 2018

Intel's Foveros-based, Hybrid x86 CPUs Mean the Company Needed to Sprinkle some ARM

by
Raevenlord
 Discuss (8 Comments)
Intel at its architecture day revealed one of the more exquisite in-house designs for the company in recent years: a hybrid x86 chip that seems to imbibe from ARM's own big.Little design mantra. The new Hybrid x86 CPU that was announced takes this design choice in pairing a single, high-performance Sunny Cove core with four smaller Atom cores. This chip is built using Intel's Foveros manufacturing technology, which means a 22FFL IO chip serves as an active interposer, connected via TSVs to a 10nm die that contains both types of cores. The tiny chips measures just 12 x 12 x 1 mm (144 mm²), and looks to reduce footprint even further by including a POP (package on package) memory design.

The new Intel design is aimed at low-power environments, with the chip having been designed to work on a 2 mW standby power ratio, with less than a 7 W of power - for a big.Little five-core design and a 64 EU design with Gen11 graphics core. Intel's Jim Keller said that the company is testing the intricacies and advantages of this design internally, so more products based on this manufacturing and packaging mantra could pop up sometime in the future.
Source: AnandTech

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8 Comments on Intel's Foveros-based, Hybrid x86 CPUs Mean the Company Needed to Sprinkle some ARM

#2
Assimilator
Seems like Intel (or maybe all the new blood there) finally realised/accepted that there's no way they're going to get Atom up to decent performance levels nor Core down to decent power ones before ARM sews up the mobile market for good, so they've gone with a compromise. "Perfect is the enemy of good enough" and maybe, hopefully, Fovoros will finally be the Intel mobile attempt that's good enough to actually succeed.
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#3
Supercrit
AssimilatorSeems like Intel (or maybe all the new blood there) finally realised/accepted that there's no way they're going to get Atom up to decent performance levels nor Core down to decent power ones before ARM sews up the mobile market for good, so they've gone with a compromise. "Perfect is the enemy of good enough" and maybe, hopefully, Fovoros will finally be the Intel mobile attempt that's good enough to actually succeed.
Don't Core M have low power usage and decent performance at 2c/4t, in fact better performance overall than 4c/4t Atoms? Only problem is Intel's arbitrary pricing prevents wide adoption.
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#4
bonehead123
big, little, ARM, pOp.....whateva yada yada yada...

when they are moar cheaper, faster & more efficient than Qualcomm's & Sammy's chips, please call me :D
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#5
R0H1T
Well it's possible that Foveros was made for Fuchsia - the alleged successor to Chrome OS & Android - the one OS to rule them all.
AssimilatorSeems like Intel (or maybe all the new blood there) finally realised/accepted that there's no way they're going to get Atom up to decent performance levels nor Core down to decent power ones before ARM sews up the mobile market for good, so they've gone with a compromise. "Perfect is the enemy of good enough" and maybe, hopefully, Fovoros will finally be the Intel mobile attempt that's good enough to actually succeed.
No core M throttles like hell for smartphone level TDP, the cores are simply too big & power hungry
SupercritDon't Core M have low power usage and decent performance at 2c/4t, in fact better performance overall than 4c/4t Atoms? Only problem is Intel's arbitrary pricing prevents wide adoption.
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#6
XiGMAKiD
A single big core is kinda weird, but my guess is it's gonna show up in new MacBook lineup so optimization won't be a problem
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#7
Vayra86
AssimilatorSeems like Intel (or maybe all the new blood there) finally realised/accepted that there's no way they're going to get Atom up to decent performance levels nor Core down to decent power ones before ARM sews up the mobile market for good, so they've gone with a compromise. "Perfect is the enemy of good enough" and maybe, hopefully, Fovoros will finally be the Intel mobile attempt that's good enough to actually succeed.
Doubtful. The reason ARM works so well is because the barrier of entry is so low. With these complicated chips, Intel is once again putting a rather complex architecture out there to battle very cheap ones.
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#8
TheinsanegamerN
R0H1TWell it's possible that Foveros was made for Fuchsia - the alleged successor to Chrome OS & Android - the one OS to rule them all.
No core M throttles like hell for smartphone level TDP, the cores are simply too big & power hungry
Devil's advocate, core M also dramatically outperformed ARM chips of the time. The two simply were not comparable. And given how abysmally slow windows on ARM executes x86 code, in real life applications the core M is still likely faster then most ARM chips today.
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