The x86 Power Myth Busted: In-Depth Clover Trail Power Analysis
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 24, 2012 5:00 PM ESTThe untold story of Intel's desktop (and notebook) CPU dominance after 2006 has nothing to do with novel new approaches to chip design or spending billions on keeping its army of fabs up to date. While both of those are critical components to the formula, its Intel's internal performance modeling team that plays a major role in providing targets for both the architects and fab engineers to hit. After losing face (and sales) to AMD's Athlon 64 in the early 2000s, Intel adopted a "no more surprises" policy. Intel would never again be caught off guard by a performance upset.
Over the past few years however the focus of meaningful performance has shifted. Just as important as absolute performance, is power consumption. Intel has been going through a slow waking up process over the past few years as it's been adapting to the new ultra mobile world. One of the first things to change however was the scope and focus of its internal performance modeling. User experience (quantified through high speed cameras mapping frame rates to user survey data) and power efficiency are now both incorporated into all architecture targets going forward. Building its next-generation CPU cores no longer means picking a SPECCPU performance target and working towards it, but delivering a certain user experience as well.
Intel's role in the industry has started to change. It worked very closely with Acer on bringing the W510, W700 and S7 to market. With Haswell, Intel will work even closer with its partners - going as far as to specify other, non-Intel components on the motherboard in pursuit of ultimate battery life. The pieces are beginning to fall into place, and if all goes according to Intel's plan we should start to see the fruits of its labor next year. The goal is to bring Core down to very low power levels, and to take Atom even lower. Don't underestimate the significance of Intel's 10W Ivy Bridge announcement. Although desktop and mobile Haswell will appear in mid to late Q2-2013, the exciting ultra mobile parts won't arrive until Q3. Intel's 10W Ivy Bridge will be responsible for at least bringing some more exciting form factors to market between now and then. While we're not exactly at Core-in-an-iPad level of integration, we are getting very close.
To kick off what is bound to be an exciting year, Intel made a couple of stops around the country showing off that even its existing architectures are quite power efficient. Intel carried around a pair of Windows tablets, wired up to measure power consumption at both the device and component level, to demonstrate what many of you will find obvious at this point: that Intel's 32nm Clover Trail is more power efficient than NVIDIA's Tegra 3.
We've demonstrated this in our battery life tests already. Samsung's ATIV Smart PC uses an Atom Z2760 and features a 30Wh battery with an 11.6-inch 1366x768 display. Microsoft's Surface RT uses NVIDIA's Tegra 3 powered by a 31Wh battery with a 10.6-inch, 1366x768 display. In our 2013 wireless web browsing battery life test we showed Samsung with a 17% battery life advantage, despite the 3% smaller battery. Our video playback battery life test showed a smaller advantage of 3%.
For us, the power advantage made a lot of sense. We've already proven that Intel's Atom core is faster than ARM's Cortex A9 (even four of them under Windows RT). Combine that with the fact that NVIDIA's Tegra 3 features four Cortex A9s on TSMC's 40nm G process and you get a recipe for worse battery life, all else being equal.
Intel's method of hammering this point home isn't all that unique in the industry. Rather than measuring power consumption at the application level, Intel chose to do so at the component level. This is commonly done by taking the device apart and either replacing the battery with an external power supply that you can measure, or by measuring current delivered by the battery itself. Clip the voltage input leads coming from the battery to the PCB, toss a resistor inline and measure voltage drop across the resistor to calculate power (good ol' Ohm's law).
Where Intel's power modeling gets a little more aggressive is what happens next. Measuring power at the battery gives you an idea of total platform power consumption including display, SoC, memory, network stack and everything else on the motherboard. This approach is useful for understanding how long a device will last on a single charge, but if you're a component vendor you typically care a little more about the specific power consumption of your competitors' components.
What follows is a good mixture of art and science. Intel's power engineers will take apart a competing device and probe whatever looks to be a power delivery or filtering circuit while running various workloads on the device itself. By correlating the type of workload to spikes in voltage in these circuits, you can figure out what components on a smartphone or tablet motherboard are likely responsible for delivering power to individual blocks of an SoC. Despite the high level of integration in modern mobile SoCs, the major players on the chip (e.g. CPU and GPU) tend to operate on their own independent voltage planes.
A basic LC filter
What usually happens is you'll find a standard LC filter (inductor + capacitor) supplying power to a block on the SoC. Once the right LC filter has been identified, all you need to do is lift the inductor, insert a very small resistor (2 - 20 mΩ) and measure the voltage drop across the resistor. With voltage and resistance values known, you can determine current and power. Using good external instruments you can plot power over time and now get a good idea of the power consumption of individual IP blocks within an SoC.
Basic LC filter modified with an inline resistor
Intel brought one of its best power engineers along with a couple of tablets and a National Instruments USB-6289 data acquisition box to demonstrate its findings. Intel brought along Microsoft's Surface RT using NVIDIA's Tegra 3, and Acer's W510 using Intel's own Atom Z2760 (Clover Trail). Both of these were retail samples running the latest software/drivers available as of 12/21/12. The Acer unit in particular featured the latest driver update from Acer (version 1.01, released on 12/18/12) which improves battery life on the tablet (remember me pointing out that the W510 seemed to have a problem that caused it to underperform in the battery life department compared to Samsung's ATIV Smart PC? it seems like this driver update fixes that problem).
I personally calibrated both displays to our usual 200 nits setting and ensured the software and configurations were as close to equal as possible. Both tablets were purchased by Intel, but I verified their performance against my own review samples and noticed no meaningful deviation. All tests and I've also attached diagrams of where Intel is measuring CPU and GPU power on the two tablets:
Microsoft Surface RT: The yellow block is where Intel measures GPU power, the orange block is where it measures CPU power
Acer's W510: The purple block is a resistor from Intel's reference design used for measuring power at the battery. Yellow and orange are inductors for GPU and CPU power delivery, respectively.
The complete setup is surprisingly mobile, even relying on a notebook to run SignalExpress for recording output from the NI data acquisition box:
Wiring up the tablets is a bit of a mess. Intel wired up far more than just CPU and GPU, depending on the device and what was easily exposed you could get power readings on the memory subsystem and things like NAND as well.
Intel only supplied the test setup, for everything you're about to see I picked and ran whatever I wanted, however I wanted. Comparing Clover Trail to Tegra 3 is nothing new, but the data I gathered is at least interesting to look at. We typically don't get to break out CPU and GPU power consumption in our tests, making this experiment a bit more illuminating.
Keep in mind that we are looking at power delivery on voltage rails that spike with CPU or GPU activity. It's not uncommon to run multiple things off of the same voltage rail. In particular, I'm not super confident in what's going on with Tegra 3's GPU rail although the CPU rails are likely fairly comparable. One last note: unlike under Android, NVIDIA doesn't use its 5th/companion core under Windows RT. Microsoft still doesn't support heterogeneous computing environments, so NVIDIA had to disable its companion core under Windows RT.
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powerarmour - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
This is apples to oranges in some respects, the 5th companion core is disabled in Windows RT for Tegra 3, plus it's GPU is faster than the PowerVR core in the Clover Trail also.sonelone - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
Once an A15 gets put in a Windows tablet, I would like to see an updated comparison.skiboysteve - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
I'm a long time reader and and engineer at national instruments. I have used that usb-6259 and signalExpress many times. Very cool to see it on my favorite siteBeenthere - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
AMD is the one who has been preaching the "User Experience" for years because their products in fact have been delivering a better User Experience when you run real apps and cut thru all the marketing B.S. and tainted benches that Intel spends fortunes on each year to manipulate hacks and consumers.It's no surprise that Intel is now trying to mislead the sheep on power consumption also, seeing as though AMD has had better power saving features in their CPU for years. Naturally Intel and certain hacks will proclaim this as an "Intel breakthrough" when in fact AMD has been leading the way in power reduction consumption in actual use - for years.
It's pretty easy to dupe the naive and gullible and Intel is really good at buying the media reporting they desire be it with ad dollars, invites to "special" events or other "perks" to gain a psychologically favorable interpretation of their latest marketing ruse-of-the-week.
The sheeple will buy into it all hook, line and sinker. If you're that technically challenged, you deserve to get fleeced.
puppies - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel!Claiming AMD "leads the way" on power consumption and intel just follows is stupid.
Have you been in a coma since "I" series cpus were released. They beat AMDs CPUs on performance, power usage and performance per watt. I'm surprised you can see to type properly with your head that far up AMDs butt.
B3an - Friday, December 28, 2012 - link
It's Beenthere. He posts nothing but THE most stupid sh*t. He takes stupid to another level.I just hope he's mentally retarded in some way because if he's not, and is actually this stupid, then i feel embarrassed for him.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, January 25, 2013 - link
He is just the average amd fanboy. He is what all you'all ( u know whom ui r) have been for years here, he has just kept hanging on this past few months or half year instead of moving with the masses politically correct mindset change.Thus, we should all treat him as any other recently yet former and now scared to remain the same amd fanboy should be treated.
He was the majority here, he still is the majority here, he's just the last one with the guts to keep the charade going... perhaps forever. A nice landmark outlining the years of abuse the amd fanboys have delivered. Hopefully he will never change, a solid reminder and future melding point for the large amd fanboy base that will re-emerge ASAP when some opportunity presents.
yyrkoon - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
Maybe on some level what you're saying is true but I find that both brands have their uses Depending on what a user wants / needs.Mostly the distinction I find is value vs reliability. Intel being slightly more reliable, while AMD offers more value. In this day and age, I think it is a mixed bag on which is more power efficient between the two.
It is hard to claim that AMD is more power efficient compared to Intel when AMD is offering 60w, 90w, and 120w desktop TDPs, where Intel is offering 35w, 45w, and 90w TDP variants. In the mobile arena, there is less distinction.
skiboysteve - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
I'm a long time reader and I'm an engineer at national instruments. Very cool to see our stuff show up in an article!Tunnah - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
I don't normally post comments, as I'm not smart enough to be able to figure into the usual conversations here, but I just had to post this to say this is an absolutely amazing article.I'm a high school drop out from the age of 15 with no further education, all my teaching has been done on my own accord, so what I know isn't indepth, it's just the broad strokes. I
I just wanted to let you know that your articles help me so much in my quest to educate myself, they're absolutely AMAZING, so easy to understand, and although I can only grasp the concepts of the things you're talking about, you propose them in a way where it doesn't go over my head.
I suppose this is just a drunken thank you message from a very grateful reader, who, without you, would be a lot more clueless about the things he really wants to understand :)