x****o
发帖数: 21566 | 1 http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/intel-aim
Intel aims another barrel at ARM with synthesizable, ultra-low-power Quark
At its Intel Developer Forum event in San Francisco today, Intel announced a
new range of low-power processors.
With the Atom project, Intel set its sights on the smartphone and tablet
markets. Its major competition in these spaces came from ARM, with its
Cortex A series of processors. Compared to Intel's desktop and laptop
processors of the time, ARM's performance was pathetic, but its processors
did something that Intel's couldn't: they drew just a watt or two of power,
often less.
With the Saltwell range of Atom processors, Intel cracked that first nut. It
had a processor that could go in a smartphone, offering decent power
consumption and good (and sometimes better than good) performance. Since its
introduction, the Saltwell family has been surpassed by various ARM parts,
but Intel should regain performance competitiveness with its Silvermont
range, rolling out over the next six months.
But Atom and the A-series only go so low. If you want to embed processors
everywhere—from the smartwatch on your wrist to a heart monitoring patch to
keep track of your health—you need to aim lower than the A-series. ARM has
such a line: the M-series.
Intel didn't. But it will be much closer soon: Quark. Just as Atom makes
Intel's desktop parts look big and hot, Quark makes Atom look big and hot.
The Quark system-on-chip will be one fifth the size of Atom and use one
tenth the power of Atom. Intel didn't provide too many other details about
Quark's specifications. The main things we know are that it will be x86
compatible and initial parts will be built on a 32nm process.
What's striking about Quark, however, is the way that Intel is selling it.
ARM is extremely flexible. The ARM company itself doesn't make any
processors; it just sells instruction sets and processor designs. Third
parties can license these and customize them as they see fit. Instruction
set licensees can design the entire chip themselves; licensees of ARM's off-
the-shelf designs can use them as-is or customize them in various ways. The
designs can be tweaked to improve performance or power usage, and they can
have other pieces integrated, such as custom blocks for mobile networking,
telephony, graphics, and so on.
Intel's designs, in contrast, have been take-it-or-leave-it affairs. If you
buy Atom from Intel, you get the GPU and system-on-chip components that
Intel chooses, and if you want to add extra capabilities, they'll have to be
separate chips.
Quark changes that. The Quark design is fully synthesizable, with extension
points to allow customers to integrate their own functional blocks onto
Quark SoCs. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich also said that although Intel would
prefer that Quark chips (including those with custom, third-party blocks) be
built on Intel's own fabs, Quark will in time be buildable by third parties.
This marks a big change for Intel. Together with its custom fab scheme—the
company is selling manufacturing capacity to third parties who want to build
chips—Intel is changing its approach to the microchip industry. What it's
doing isn't innovative, per se—other companies have offered fabrication
services (e.g. TSMC and AMD-spin off Global Foundries) and processor designs
(e.g. ARM) for a long time. But Intel has made its riches from being fully
integrated: selling Intel-designed chips, built on Intel's production lines.
This approach made sense for the PC market, but it's a much harder sell in
the embedded space, where design customization is not just common but
expected. Intel isn't as flexible as ARM yet, but with Quark, it's taking a
big step closer. | p*******m
发帖数: 20761 | | u****d
发帖数: 23938 | 3 64位的吧？
intel现在还有不是64位的CPU没有？
这么说，微软又领先果子和狗了。 | h*********r
发帖数: 10182 | 4 这个估计会用在tablet上。
很可能win8和android都有。 | m****u
发帖数: 3915 | | G*****h
发帖数: 33134 | 6 肯定比atom慢至少一个数量级
【在 m****u 的大作中提到】
: 明显是为了可穿戴设备
| r******n
发帖数: 4522 | |
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