Simon Farnsworth (simon.delete@this.farnz.org.uk) on September 25, 2013 5:32 am wrote:
> anon (anon.delete@this.anon.com) on September 25, 2013 4:22 am wrote:
> > Simon Farnsworth (simon.delete@this.farnz.org.uk) on September 25, 2013 4:06 am wrote:
> > > Here's some uninformed speculation for you: Intel's biggest design advantage over their
> > > ARM competition is their skill in memory controllers. Iris Pro 5200 shows that one trick
> > > Intel can pull off is eDRAM designed for high performance; if Intel can sustain that performance,
> > > but offer low power consumption, you get the following speculation:
> > >
> > > Intel will offer a future phone/tablet chip with eDRAM on package replacing external memory completely (2
> > > GiB, 4 GiB, 16 GiB, whatever is appropriate to the market at the time). This chip will be expensive for
> > > the performance level it provides, but will always win power consumption measurements (and thus battery
> > > life benchmarks), by a large margin for applications that make heavy use of GPU and CPU, and a small margin
> > > for applications whose power consumption is dominated by other system components such as the screen.
> > >
> > > By being lower power consumption while having comparable performance to competing chips, it gives
> > > Intel-based phones and tablets a power consumption advantage. This, in turn, gets Intel design
> > > wins in high-end Android devices, as they can either design a nicer case with a smaller battery,
> > > or use the same battery size as a competing design, but with a longer battery life.
> > >
> > > All speculation, and it turns on Intel being able to offer
> > > low power, high performance eDRAM to make the sale.
> >
> > IBM has a lot of experience with eDRAM memory now, and
> > they share a lot of process tech with other foundries.
> >
> > Intel *may* get there first if they have a density edge, but if the technique
> > gives an advantage, I don't think others will be too far behind.
> >
>
> In my speculative world, you need both eDRAM process technology (and I'd be surprised too if Intel
> was ahead of anyone there, given IBM's long experience with it) and decent memory controller design
> experience to exploit eDRAM. IBM has that experience, as does Intel; I'm not sure how much experience
> the ARM vendors have with designing high performance, high efficiency memory controllers (my experience
> of ARM-based SoCs is that the memory subsystem is the biggest let-down in system performance).

Well, given their history and target markets, one would presume that ARM designers know something about power efficient memory controllers at their design power targets.

As for performance, a look at geekbench 3 memory performance for various ARMs versus various Atoms, it doesn't seem like you could say Intel has a really notable advantage (not that such tests tell everything).

ARM memory subsystems have become much faster in the last several years.