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https://www.techpowerup.com/243071/intel...adaptation
Quote:big.LITTLE is an innovation by ARM, which seeks to minimize power-draw on mobile devices. It is a sort of heterogeneous multi-core CPU design, in which a few "big" high-performance CPU cores work alongside a few extremely low-power "little" CPU cores. The idea here is that the low-power cores consume much lesser power at max load, than the high-performance cores at their minimum power-state, so the high-performance cores can be power-gated when the system doesn't need them (i.e. most of the time).
Intel finds itself with two distinct x86 implementations at any given time. It has low-power CPU micro-architectures such as "Silvermont," "Goldmont," and "Goldmont Plus," etc., implemented on low-power product lines such as the Pentium Silver series; and it has high-performance micro-architectures, such as "Haswell," "Skylake," and "Coffee Lake." The company wants to take a swing at its own heterogeneous multi-core CPU, according to tech stock analyst Ashraf Eassa, with the Motley Fool.
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A chip like this would need popular operating systems to be redesigned to be aware of the asymmetry. That would involve changes to the kernel scheduler, so it could know which threads to send to which cores. Given that Intel's 10 nm process, on which "Ice Lake" is based, is scheduled for a 2019-20 roll-out, "Lakefield" chip may not see a launch this year.
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https://www.techpowerup.com/270010/windo...enchmarked
Quote:A performance review of the Intel Core i5-L16G7 "Lakefield" Hybrid processor (powering a Samsung Galaxy S notebook) was recently published by Golem.de, which provides an in-depth look at Intel's ambitious new processor design that sets in motion the two new philosophies Intel will build its future processors on - packaging modularity provided by innovative new chip packaging technologies such as Foveros; and Hybrid processing, where there are two sets of CPU cores with vastly different microarchitectures and significantly different performance/Watt curves that let the processor respond to different kinds of workloads while keeping power-draw low. This concept was commercially proliferated first by Arm, with its big.LITTLE topology that took to the market around 2013. The "Lakefield" i5-L16G7 combines a high-performance "Sunny Cove" CPU core with four smaller "Tremont" cores, and Gen11 iGPU.
The Golem.de report reveals that Windows 10 thread scheduler is aware of the hybrid multi-core topology of "Lakefield," and that it is able to classify workloads at a very advanced level so the right kind of core is in use at any given time. The "Sunny Cove" core is called upon when interactive vast serial processing loads are in demand. This could even be something like launching applications, new tabs in a multi-process web-browser, or less-parallelized media encoding. The four "Tremont" cores keep the machine "cruising," handling much of the operational workload of an application, and is also better tuned to cope with highly parallelized workloads. This is similar to a hybrid automobile, where the combustion engine provides tractive effort from 0 kph, while the electric motor sustains a cruising speed.
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Much of what Intel learns from "Lakefield" will be implemented in future client-segment architectures such as "Meteor Lake," which will combine larger hybrid CPU core arrays to achieve high core counts. The i5-L16G7 allows notebook designers to make ultra portable devices with the power envelope of Snapdragon, but with the benefits of x86.
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https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sam...-lakefield
Quote:The Samsung Galaxy Book S is a nice -- but pricey -- system that puts the “ultra” in ultraportable. The design is sleek and lightweight, and I never stopped being impressed by it.
It’s also the first time we’re seeing Intel’s Lakefield processor, and the 5-core CPU seems to largely land within expectations. Intel had previously compared it to its Y-series chips, and that makes sense in this fanless system. The performance isn’t strong by many means, but if you’re using this for word processing, e-mail and web browsing, it should be enough.
In the battle between Windows running on Lakefield’s x86 architecture and Windows on Arm, Intel wins from an experience perspective. After all, every x86 app, 32-bit or 64-bit, runs on this system. But the Microsoft SQ1, a variant of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx found in many Arm laptops, did outperform in some places, even when emulating benchmarks. When more apps are Arm native, Intel will need a more powerful chip.
But the Acer Swift 3, a $650 mid-range ultraportable with a more traditional AMD Ryzen 7 4700U x86 processor beats them both in that area. For almost half the price, you can get a lot more performance. You will, however, get a dull screen and less premium build quality. Samsung is charging way too much for a nice design.
We expect to see Lakefield at least once more this year in the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold. But as for the Galaxy Book S, it’s a nice portable experience if you don’t need powerhouse performance.
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