Hi everybody,

I've been lurking for years, but the time has come when I would really love to pick the brains of the experts we have here. From my understanding, Atom is a much narrower design than Krait, Cortex A15 and others, and yet, in many benchmarks the older Saltwell core holds its own against even Krait in both FPU/INT, and against A15 in Linux integer benchmarks (but it gets decimated in FPU).

So, my question is, how do I think about "Silvermont" competitive position against a fairly beefy modern ARM design such as the Cortex A15? From a high level perspective, it looks like on a per-clock basis it should be no contest - A15 is wider and more aggressive. But Intel is claiming that Silvermont is as fast as A15 on a per-clock basis.

A couple of questions then:

1. How can a narrower design pull this off?
2. Is this likely to be integer only as A15 includes FMAC instructions, which in the right cases double FPU performance?

Thank you all so much!

Regards,
Ashraf Eassa