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A CPU wafer

Before this twelvemonth, Intel announced that its adjacent-generation Cantlet architecture, Goldmont, would be confined to netbooks and the depression-end of the desktop market. Previously, Goldmont was meant to serve as the anchor for a new range of Intel products and offering the starting time architectural refresh since Bay Trail launched in 2013.

Unlike Kaby Lake, which got the full launch treatment earlier this year, Goldmont has slipped out the door with almost no acknowledgment or briefing from Intel. Intel has added some features, including total hardware decode for VP9 and HEVC (though not HEVC Main10) support for the S0ix sleep state, Gen9 graphics (up from Gen8), and six PCI Express 2.0 lanes, up from four. The number of Execution Units (EUs) attached to the GPU is also up to 18, from a previous max of sixteen.

Equally Anandtech details, however, these relatively pocket-size advances come with a significant increase in TDP. Intel's previous Atom processors had a TDP of vi.5W across the product stack, while all of the Airmont products unveiled today are 10W fries. That's a pregnant jump for the new architecture, though it may not translate into higher power consumption at the wall (nosotros'll render to this shortly).

Intel has previously positioned Apollo Lake as a toll-saving opportunity for the various OEMs, as the slide below makes articulate:

intel_apollo_lake_atom_

At that place may be practiced reason for this. Cutting prices is one of the few means of encouraging cease users to buy, even in a PC market where prices have been rock-bottom for a very long fourth dimension. Chromebooks take also stolen a significant chunk of the overall market and Intel undoubtedly wants more of these systems to ship with x86 hardware instead of the ARM-based solutions some companies take shipped. Intel'south Gen9 GPU will support the DX12_1 characteristic prepare and offers its own memory stream compression, which should help overall performance, though systems at these toll points are rarely useful for anything more than taxing than a Facebook game.

Intel is also claiming that Goldmont will offer a thirty% performance proceeds on CPU and a 45% proceeds in GPU performance, though it didn't offer any slides or details to dorsum that merits upwardly. Nosotros nevertheless don't know what Intel inverse or how Goldmont differs from Airmont — but this plays into the TDP considerations we mentioned above. Specifically, all of new Goldmont desktop CPUs in the Pentium J4 and Celeron J3 families take roughly equivalent clock speeds to the Airmont CPUs they replace, but are rated for a 10W TDP up from 6.5W for Airmont. The mobile Goldmont CPUs are all rated for 6W — merely they besides take a serious whack on base frequency, from i.6GHz downward to i.1GHz.

TDP (Thermal Design Ability) is a complex topic and is generally defined as the typical expected power dissipation of a CPU in representative workloads. Nosotros don't know how Intel sets its clock points inside its workloads — how much of the total fourth dimension is spent at max Turbo, how much at lesser speeds, and how much at the base frequency. What we exercise know is that the CPU base frequency tin be idea of as a sort-of flooring. Since Intel defines the base clock every bit the CPU clock you'll get at all times unless the CPU is overheating, and since TDP is a metric that Intel gives heatsink and cooling solution manufacturers to target for optimal performance, nosotros can safely assume that TDP is calculated to ensure the CPU doesn't get hot plenty to first throttling to protect its ain performance.

The fact that Intel has both bumped up the TDP rating on the desktop chips by one.53x and cut the base clock on the mobile fries past 31% suggests that Goldmont may not accept come up out the way Intel was hoping it would. There'south enough play in these figures that Goldmont could still evidence to be more power efficient than Airmont in certain workloads — over again, we don't know how Intel calculates TDP precisely, and if chips burst up to higher frequencies and complete workloads more rapidly, the stop result can be lower power consumption over time. We also don't know if Goldmont is built on Intel'southward 14nm process or the 14nm+ it used for Kaby Lake.

Upward until now, most interpretations of Intel's decision to leave the smartphone and tablet markets have focused on the fact that Intel was still shipping products contra-revenue and was less interested in trying to purchase its way into that space. To be clear, I recall those were all the same major components of the company'south reasoning — only it's also possible that Intel looked at how Goldmont was shaping up and realized that whatsoever the CPU's merits in mobile and desktop processing, information technology wouldn't exist an architecture that could take the fight to ARM in smartphones and tablets.