ST-E Will Have FD-SOI Based U8540: 35% Lower Power, Much Higher Frequencies

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/28/2012 4:24:00 AM
Posted in smartphones , Tablets , SoC , ST-Ericsson

There's a close relationship between process technology and performance/power consumption, and it's about to get even more important in mobile. We've already seen that with the transition to 40nm and we will see that shortly with the transition to 28nm. Today ST-E announced its upcoming U8540 will use fully depleted silicon on insulator (FD-SOI) transistors to gain a performance and power advantage over the competition. As an example, AMD originally introduced SOI to its processors in the early 2000s as a way of decreasing power and increasing clock speeds. ST-E claims the move to FD-SOI will allow for much higher operating frequencies compared to the L8540, or much lower power at the same switching speed.

Integrated baseband clearly offers some advantages in the market, but a process technology advantage can be even more important...

Print This Article 4 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment ST Microelectronics has FD-SOI? by AMDJunkie on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 I'm guessing the "working with ST" means the fabs at ST Microelectronics? Also, the slide only mentions the specific process technology of FD-SOI. Is there a confirmation that this is also 28nm? Or is it going to use more mature 40nm with the FD-SOI making up the gap between competitors moving to the smaller node? AMDJunkie Reply RE: ST Microelectronics has FD-SOI? by rocketbuddha on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 To my knowledge there has been 130nm, 65nm, 45nm, 32nm SOI as full nodes. This is the first time I am openly seeing a half-node SOI at 28nm if you exclude the now cancelled roadmaps of Bulldozer successors like Terramar and Sepang.

AMD likely can find a new fab partner for its MPUs if u ask me ;-) rocketbuddha Reply More context is needed. by danjw on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 Who is ST-E? I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it came up blank. danjw Reply What ST-E means... by murray13 on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 It's ST Ericsson.

Just look at the logo in the pic and then look at their website.

http://www.stericsson.com murray13 Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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AMD Releases Two Llano Based Athlon II X4 CPUs

by Kristian Vättö on 2/8/2012 1:39:00 PM
Posted in CPUs , AMD , Llano

AMD has quietly released two Athlon II X4 CPUs, the 638 and 641. These are based on Llano (i.e. Stars+/K10.5 architecture) but lack an integrated GPU. The socket is still FM1, just like in normal Llano CPUs. Here's a quick rundown of the chips.

Specifications of AMD Athlon II X4 638 and 641Model638641Core/Thread Count4/44/4Base Frequency2.7GHz2.8GHzL2 Cache4MB4MBTDP65W100WPrice$81$81

There is nothing extraordinaty in these chips. We are looking at relatively low-end SKUs in terms of price and performance. It's good to keep in mind that a discrete GPU is needed because these SKUs lack integrated graphics, so that will potentially raise the total system price.

The usage of the Athlon II brand with Llano isn't actually a new thing as the first such SKU, Athlon II X4 631, launched back in August. This is quite similar to what Intel is doing; AMD is saving the A4, A6, A8, and FX brands (their rough equivalent of Intel's Core i3/i5/i7) for midrange and high-end chips, and reusing their older Sempron and Athlon brand names (e.g. Intel's Celeron and Pentium) with lower-end SKUs.

Source: CPU-World

Print This Article 12 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Price? by tipoo on Wednesday, February 08, 2012 Are both really the same price? And how does the TDP go up 35W just from a .1GHz bump? tipoo Reply RE: Price? by Kristian Vättö on Wednesday, February 08, 2012 I know, it makes no sense at all. Maybe the 638 is a higher binned chip with lower power consumption, though it should cost more then.

However, remember that TDP is the maximum power consumption (well, not maximum but what you would experience under commercial load) so while there is 35W difference, it may not be that big in the real world. Kristian Vättö Reply RE: Price? by RU482 on Wednesday, February 08, 2012 They probably weren't designed this way, but rather are derived from higher end parts that failed certain parts of the qual test. RU482 Reply RE: Price? by JarredWalton on Wednesday, February 08, 2012 Higher power, slightly higher clock speed, same price -- makes sense to me. Most likely these parts are something specific OEMs are interested in selling (e.g. they have some old HD 5470 GPUs to pair them with or something). I personally wouldn't want either one, as Llano without the IGP is rather silly, but to each his own. JarredWalton Reply RE: Price? by Kristian Vättö on Wednesday, February 08, 2012 It's just odd that for 3.7% increase in frequency, the TDP goes up by 53.8%. Of course, TDP is just a directional number like I said, not really an accurate indication of the power consumption. Kristian Vättö Reply RE: Price? by tpurves on Wednesday, February 08, 2012 These just look like AMD offloading partly working GPU-defective A-series parts onto the OEM market. Chips that have a CPU but not an APU that works get the lower TDP part. Chips that fail at a working GPU AND fail at meeting power/speedbin targets get dumped as the high TDP part. tpurves Reply RE: Price? by silverblue on Thursday, February 09, 2012 The TDP isn't going to be indicative of the actual usage; I'm unsure as to why AMD didn't revise that figure, unless the GPU part still uses power much like the 5830 using more power than the 5850 even with some parts disabled. silverblue Reply RE: Price? by MrSpadge on Wednesday, February 08, 2012 The 641 probably uses 70 - 75 W, if the 638 uses 65 W. More important here is that AMD doesn't guarantee it's not going to draw more - they could sell any crap using this sticker. Fair deal. MrSpadge Reply "these SKUs lack integrated graphics, so that will potentially raise the total system price" by Belard on Wednesday, February 08, 2012 Huh?

The AMD A8-3850 Llano 2.9GHz costs about $130, its 100Mhz more than the AII X4-641 which is $81~85. The cost of the built-in GPU is added to the costs.... duh.

The price difference is $50. The HD 6570 128bit video card is $45~65 will smoke the built-in GPU.

So the price difference is nominal. Especially if the person wants to add a GPU card anyway. In which case, they should really pay the $20 extra costs for an FX-4100 3.6Ghz 95w CPU.

AMD has issues it cross-over products. the 8MB of L3 cache is missing on Llano. The Unlocked A-38xx is just as dumb. Its a $140 CPU that doesn't have the OC headroom of an FX Chip... Belard Reply Video-less A8 repurposing, no doubt by Ethaniel on Thursday, February 09, 2012 If I remember correctly, the A8-3800 (65w) works at 2.7 Ghz in Turbo mode, while the A8-3850 (100w) works at 2.9 Ghz without Turbo. So, the 638 looks like a A8-3800 in "sustained Turbo" (I guess the lack of functional video allows that), and the 641 is a A8-3850 dropped to 2.8 Ghz. Makes me remember those i486SX with a broken FPU. Damn, I'm old. Ethaniel Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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AppliedMicro Demonstrates Catalina Based Platforms

by Ganesh T S on 1/15/2012 7:09:00 AM
Posted in Trade Shows , CES , CES 2012 , AppliedMicro

The launch of the AppliedMicro's Catalina SoC for the NAS market was covered here. In a follow up to the initial coverage, we visited AMCC at CES to look at the various reference platforms in action.

The Catalina SoC (APM86491) packs a single core Power 465 processor and has a bunch of offload features for accelerated network processing. A host of high speed interfaces (including USB 3.0 host/device, Gigabit Ethernet, SATA and PCI-E Gen 2.0 ports) makes it suitable for consumer NAS systems and wireless access points.

At CES, AppliedMicro had three different reference designs (two using the APM86491, and one using the APM82181). The first one, Riviera, was a standard NAS / Media Server design. Malibu, the second reference design, was for a wireless router. PhiPhi, based on the APM82181, was for a media server with inbuilt transcoding.

Riviera

The Riviera reference design demonstrated was a 4-bay RAID5 NAS. Two drives are connected directly to the two SATA ports on the APM86491. The other two drives are connected to the PCI-E Gen 2.0 ports using a SATA to PCI-E bridge chip. One of the USB 3.0 host ports was connected to an external SSD. There were two GbE ports in the reference design, but only one of them was connected to the PC.

A simple robocopy benchmark was run to test the read and write speeds. Over one GbE port, read speeds of around 110 MBps and write speeds of around 74 MBps were observed. The USB 3.0 bandwidth seemed to be limited only by the SSD and mechanical access speeds. This sort of performance seems to be better than what I observed with the last generation platform in the WD My Book Live. It appears that
designs based on Riviera may give Marvell's NAS platform based designs a run for their money.

Another interesting aspect of Riviera was the unconnected USB 3.0 host / device port on the APM86491. A vendor could easily tweak Riviera to expose this as a device port. In that case, the unit would be a NAS / DAS (Direct Attached Storage) combo. The demo also involved accessing the files on the NAS through an iOS / Android app, but it was nothing that I hadn't already seen in action on the My Book Live.

Malibu

The Malibu reference design demonstrated was a wireless access point with two 3x3 802.11n Atheros Qualcomm radios connected to the APM86491's two PCI-E 2.0 ports.

Since the APM86491 includes hardware accelerated network processing, AppliedMicro claimed speeds of upto 650 Mbps in the above configuration (thereby implying that it could scale upto 802.11ac speeds, if necessary).The USB 3.0 host port in the design can be used to attach storage to the router. I haven't seen any router in the market currently based on an AppliedMicro SoC. So, it will be interesting to see if the Malibu platform gets converted into a shipping product.

PhiPhi

As a media enthusiast, the most interesting reference design was the APM82181 based PhiPhi. It was a home media server with transcoding inbuilt. We had already looked at the details of the APM82181 in the My Book Live review.

The reference design was a simple 1-bay NAS. It was connected to a network on which a WDTV Live SMP was also connected. The media server program running on the Phi-Phi exposed various files on the NAS to the streamer. When played back, the PhiPhi transcoded the stream to a pre-determined format and sent it to the streamer. A home media server with transcoding inbuilt could enable the device to support
DLNA renderers which don't implement support for a lot of codecs. In hindsight, the demo could have been more impressive if a mobile device capable of only playing a lower resolution stream was used instead of the WDTV Live SMP.

AppliedMicro indicated that one of the PCI-E ports on the SoC was connected to a Zenverge ZN200 chip. Before CES, we saw a joint press release by Zenverge and PacketVideo (developers of the TwonkyServer), indicating that the ZN200 could transcode videos to further expand DLNA support even in the case of very finicky renderers. Another press release by Zenverge suggested that the ZN200 could transcode upto 4 HD streams simultaneously. The only supported formats seem to be MPEG-2 and H.264 on the source side, which could limit usefulness in situations other than those involving just changes in resolution / modification of encode characteristics of MPEG-2 / H.264 videos.

The addition of a hardware transcoder to a media server is an interesting development, but the success of such a product heavily depends on performance and price. Of the three platforms demonstrated, this is the one which intrigues me the most. I am looking forward to the market debut of this interesting reference design.

Print This Article 4 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Router by Einy0 on Sunday, January 15, 2012 I like that router concept. Three external antennas, full 3x3 802.11n and USB 3.0 host. If someone can make a stable, full featured firmware... Oh and how much power does it consume? Einy0 Reply RE: Router by Einy0 on Sunday, January 15, 2012 lol nm about 3W for the SoC. Sounds like a winner to me... Einy0 Reply Damn, if only it could transcode something other than mpeg and h.264. by nevertell on Sunday, January 15, 2012 Aren't those formats already decodable by most of the HDTV's and gaming consoles ? I mean, if your device can decode some sort of video, it's most likely mepg2 and h.264. This practically renders these transcoders useless. I'd love to retire my powerhungry NAS/media server pc and start using something like this, but this feature is holding me back. nevertell Reply RE: Damn, if only it could transcode something other than mpeg and h.264. by ct760ster on Tuesday, January 17, 2012 I think it's mean to transcode on the fly any exotic or rare video format into the more common ones you mentioned before, let's say MKV or Real media into mpeg2 or h264 baseline profile. ct760ster Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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