Intel Shipping 14nm Cherry Trail
by Ian Cutress on January 5, 2015 12:40 PM EST- Posted in
- SoCs
- Intel
- Trade Shows
- CES 2015
- 14nm
- Cherry Trail
Also on the list of Intel announcements today is that Cherry Trail, the next generation Atom architecture, is shipping to customers. For end-users, this means a realistic time frame of Q2 when products will be on the shelves. Cherry Trail is the successor to Bay Trail on the smaller process node, while offering improved graphics and battery life, similar to the claims made by Broadwell-U earlier today.
Given that Intel’s press release today was short and mentioned connectivity with their XMM726x modem with Cat 6 LTE with aggregation, it sounds specifically that Cherry Trail for smartphones/tablets is the order of the day, rather than larger or desktop systems. Cherry Trail will also be a focus point for Intel’s RealSense technology, with Intel wanting to promote their ‘no wires, no password’ philosophy.
Rather than provide more detail about SKUs and price points, Intel is allowing their customers to announce the products that will be featuring the SoC, with a larger update of specifications to follow. We’ve heard talk of Cherry Trail products that might be announced at CES, and if we catch any we will let you know.
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III-V - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
They'll be running those at lower clocks, most likely. It is typically more efficient from a power standpoint, for GPUs, to have more units clocked at a lower speed, rather than have fewer units clocked at higher speed. The tradeoff is cost.Still, the performance increase should be substantial -- perhaps 275-300% of Bay Trail.
III-V - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Actually, Intel themselves stated a "2x" increase, so I was just a bit on the optimistic side, as I usually am. :)Need to get better at tempering my estimations.
jb14 - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
Any news on Braswell and possible release dates? I liked the baytrail implementation on the Lenovo 2 11 and dell 11 3000 convertibles so hoping for braswell refreshes instead of core M to keep the costs and heat down.Thorburn - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
Core M shares the same TDP as the Atom parts now.azazel1024 - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
Based on Intel's stated goals for Atom over the next few years, I'd be suprised if there wasn't a huge jump in performance. Look at what Core M Broadwell can manage with barely more power budget for it's GPU. Cherry Trail I believe will have two GPU setups, an 8EU and a 16EU arrangement. Or at least that was the word as of a few months ago.My guess is lower clocked EUs, but lots more of them. I'd suspect something in the range of a 50-150% improvement over current Bay Trail for the 8EU part and 100-300% increase for the 16EU part, just depending on how they are clocked.
The GPU in Bay Trail is a little "sad" right now and Intel is shooting for a HUGE increase in GPU performance in just a ~3 year time frame, so unless they are planning on missing their mark big time, they need at least a doubling of performance every year to get them in their ball park (which I believe was an increase of 10x in GPU performance within 3 years when they said it this past summer).
Looking on the CPU side of things, if the architecture remains 100% stagnant, the top end Cherry Trail is coming with a modest 200MHz clock speed bump, again, unless Intel has changed that as of this past summer when they revealed as much as they ever have about Cherry Trail. No idea on the CPU, but again, they are talking up big CPU gains over that 3 year time frame, so I'd be suprised if we didn't see a larger than Ivy/Haswell/Broadwell IPC bump, maybe in the 15-25% range? I know that the CPU arch isn't getting a full overhaul, just a process shrink, but unless Goldmont/Willow Trail is a truely massive redesign of the CPU arch, they need to average something like 65% per generation for 3 years (because I think Intel's claim was 5x CPU and 10x GPU in 3 years), even if you factor in that some of it might be from clock speed gains, you'd still need a moderate IPC gain at a minimum every generation.
azazel1024 - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
Dang it, not what I meant. I meant 1.5-1.75x for the 8EU and 2-3x for the 16EU over the current Bay Trail-T.andrewaggb - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
well this is certainly more exciting the the broadwell announcement. I'd love for these chips to not suck. Guess we'll see.I have a bay trail tablet, and for the most part I'm pretty happy with it, but it could use a big gpu boost and at a moderate cpu boost. Sounds like this should be both, but we'll see.
mkozakewich - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
I can play Minecraft on my tiny HP Stream 7, so take that as you will. It sounds like Cherry Trail will be far more capable.zodiacfml - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
Oh I hope they maintain the TDP, the previous Atom already has good consumption, more than 6 to 8 hours on an Asus t100 or similar.Impulses - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
Now if only MS would make a non-Pro Cherry Trail Surface...