Intel Unveils Meteor Lake Architecture: Intel 4 Heralds the Disaggregated Future of Mobile CPUs
by Gavin Bonshor on September 19, 2023 11:35 AM ESTI/O Tile: Extended and Scalable Depending on Segment
The smallest of Meteor Lake's tiles is the I/O tile, which is primarily designed to offer additional connectivity features. This, of course, is down to two things; specific vendor's needs and the grade of processor itself. As Meteor Lake is scalable, the I/O tile is perhaps the crux of enabling specific features such as Thunderbolt 4 on devices. A lower-end Intel Core 3 Meteor Lake chip is likely to drop flashy I/O-specific features such as TB4 to save on cost, as entry-level notebooks aren't going to use it.
The higher end of the Meteor Lake product stack will feature Thunderbolt 4, and although it will be on the I/O tile for notebook vendors to utilize, having a scalable I/O fabric allows Intel to implement a modular approach to I/O features instead of one that is more one size fits all. The I/O tile includes additional PCIe lanes, but this number will vary depending on the processor itself; a higher-end chip will have more for additional storage needs, whereas a lower-end chip will have the minimum for connectivity and whatnot. Something else is that the I/O tile isn't a PCIe Coherent Fabric, which means data can only be transferred without the support for cache coherency between memory and devices.
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GeoffreyA - Saturday, September 23, 2023 - link
I agree with most of what you're saying. What I was trying to get at is that there seems to be a belief that Apple has superior engineering ingenuity than Intel and AMD, when really, it is the difference between fixed- and variable-length instruction sets and all that entails. What I'd like to see is all of them on the same playing field and where each then stands, from a CPU point of view. Quite likely, there won't be much of a difference because good design principles are always the same. It's trying to be out of the ordinary that leads to Pentium 4s and Bulldozers.GeoffreyA - Saturday, September 23, 2023 - link
And yes, I'd like to see RISC-V winning in the end, rather than ARM.GeoffreyA - Saturday, September 23, 2023 - link
The thing is, ARM is almost fully ready on the Windows side of the coin. Windows on ARM appears to be working well, x64 emulation is up and running, increasingly more programs are getting ARM compiles, and Microsoft's VS and compilers now have ARM on an equal footing with x64. So, if Intel or AMD decided to make an ARM CPU, people could go over quite easily, similar to the early days of x64.FWhitTrampoline - Thursday, September 21, 2023 - link
Edit: royalist/encumberments to royalty/encumberments!And Firefox's Spell Checker is so bad that The Mozilla Foundation should be stripped of their Tax Exempt status until they fully comply and fix that.
Bluetooth - Saturday, September 23, 2023 - link
Intel has proposed X86-S ISA, to get rid of all the legacy code and boot directly into 64 bit, (the proposal is available on their website). But I don't know, if this is enough to allow them to build wider decoders to improve the single thread performance.GeoffreyA - Saturday, September 23, 2023 - link
I took a look at x86-S and it certainly would be welcome, getting rid of unnecessary legacy features. From my understanding, I don't think it would help to build wider decoders. The problem in x86 is that the length of each instruction varies and is not known beforehand. At execution time, length has got to be worked out in predecode, and I imagine this constrains how much can be sent through the decoders, as well as taking up a great deal of power. In the fixed-width ISA, it is trivial to know where each instruction starts and send them off to the decoders in mass. A bit like comparing a linked list with an array.FWhitTrampoline - Tuesday, September 19, 2023 - link
up to clocked 2Ghz+ should read: Clocked up to.Bluetooth - Saturday, September 23, 2023 - link
He may overstate the power, but don't diss his remark by only focusing on that error, as the mobile processor is running at much lower frequencies.tipoo - Tuesday, September 19, 2023 - link
It sounds like you carried forward 3W from 2008. The A17 Pro draws more power than ever.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX_RQpMUNx0
StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, September 19, 2023 - link
He is nothing but a liar.