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The Intel version of the surface tablet gets only half the battery life of the ARM version. ARM is also moving forward with a big.little architecture that dupl

The Intel version of the surface tablet gets only half the battery life of the ARM version. ARM is also moving forward with a big.little architecture that duplicates the CPU cores for either high-energy or low-energy situations. Intel still has a way to go…

dragontamer 14y ago
The Intel version of the Surface is an ultrabook-class i5 CPU. It is dozens of times faster than the ARM one. They're just not comparable at all. True, it has much less battery life, but also significantly more processing power... enough to run full scale Photoshop. Intel has much to fear from ARM, but not from NVidia... especially big.little. Outside of NVidia-specific project Shield, it doesn't sound like Tegra 4 has any design wins. In fact, NVidia's big.little architecture is arguably a failure. Surface RT == NVidia Tegra 3 with big.little (btw: Surface RT doesn't use big.little features at all. Perhaps Microsoft is trying to keep SurfaceRT code portable across different ARM chips). In comparison, the iPad4 is an Apple custom ARM chip, and the Nexus 4 is Qualcomm Snapdragon. Current Nexus 7 is Tegra3, but the next one is rumored to be Qualcomm Snapdragon as well. Basically, NVidia is weakening in the mobile sector. ARM overall is strong, but big.little is arguably a failure at this point.
- timthorn 14y ago
  The Tegra 3 doesn't use big.LITTLE. It does have a 5th, smaller core - but that's not big.LITTLE.
  - dragontamer 14y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. I guess I got things mixed up. Are there any big.LITTLE implementations out there? Wikipedia only mentions Samsung Exynos 5 Octa, which doesn't have any designs right now.
    - timthorn 14y ago
      I don't believe so, but willing to be proven wrong!
ajross 14y ago
The Intel version of the surface tablet is more than twice as fast (more like 3-4x faster depending on benchmark and workload -- things like SIMD or L3-cache-bound tasks are well over 10x faster) as the ARM version. ARM still has a way to go. Apples to oranges. The Surface RT is an iPad competitor. The Surface Pro is a PC. You can make business arguments as to which is the more appropriate device and which makes the better tradeoffs, but there's no serious technical point to be made here.
iyulaev 14y ago
What about tablets like the Lenovo thinkpad tablet 2? Atom powered, gets 7h+ battery life, weight and power comparable to arm tabletsa, and can run x86 code.

dragontamer 14y ago

The Intel version of the Surface is an ultrabook-class i5 CPU. It is dozens of times faster than the ARM one. They're just not comparable at all. True, it has much less battery life, but also significantly more processing power... enough to run full scale Photoshop. Intel has much to fear from ARM, but not from NVidia... especially big.little. Outside of NVidia-specific project Shield, it doesn't sound like Tegra 4 has any design wins. In fact, NVidia's big.little architecture is arguably a failure. Surface RT == NVidia Tegra 3 with big.little (btw: Surface RT doesn't use big.little features at all. Perhaps Microsoft is trying to keep SurfaceRT code portable across different ARM chips). In comparison, the iPad4 is an Apple custom ARM chip, and the Nexus 4 is Qualcomm Snapdragon. Current Nexus 7 is Tegra3, but the next one is rumored to be Qualcomm Snapdragon as well. Basically, NVidia is weakening in the mobile sector. ARM overall is strong, but big.little is arguably a failure at this point.

timthorn 14y ago
The Tegra 3 doesn't use big.LITTLE. It does have a 5th, smaller core - but that's not big.LITTLE.
- dragontamer 14y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. I guess I got things mixed up. Are there any big.LITTLE implementations out there? Wikipedia only mentions Samsung Exynos 5 Octa, which doesn't have any designs right now.
  - timthorn 14y ago
    I don't believe so, but willing to be proven wrong!

ajross 14y ago

The Intel version of the surface tablet is more than twice as fast (more like 3-4x faster depending on benchmark and workload -- things like SIMD or L3-cache-bound tasks are well over 10x faster) as the ARM version. ARM still has a way to go. Apples to oranges. The Surface RT is an iPad competitor. The Surface Pro is a PC. You can make business arguments as to which is the more appropriate device and which makes the better tradeoffs, but there's no serious technical point to be made here.

iyulaev 14y ago

What about tablets like the Lenovo thinkpad tablet 2? Atom powered, gets 7h+ battery life, weight and power comparable to arm tabletsa, and can run x86 code.