The Future of Netbooks: Bay Trail Specs Leaked

Bay Trail is on the move again, barreling right along toward its holiday 2013 launch. Specifications for the next generation of netbook processors have been leaked alongside those for desktop and industrial Atoms, Celerons, and Pentiums, and the numbers look very promising. (Oh, you haven't heard yet? Intel's Silvermont microarchitecture is fast enough to be used in some Celeron and Pentium processors. Woof.)

An interesting thing to notice is the absence of the Atom name in the leaked Bay Trail-M model names. Perhaps Intel wanted to improve the public image of their new mobile chips by avoiding the Atom moniker, which, as you all know, has a bad reputation for being a slow, worthless piece of silicon. It's a smart move, as the names will not only avoid the bad Atom PR, but will be reflective of the architecture's massively improved performance. Basically, Silvermont is all of the improvements the Atom line should've had over its lifespan rolled up into one release, especially in the graphics department. With the slowest of the bunch, the Celeron N2805, Doom 3 will be not only playable on Ultra, but fluid on High settings. That's a huge leap over today's Cedar Trail GPU's (believe me, you wouldn't want to play Doom 3 on them unless you have an unusual tolerance for low framerates), and from the look of things, it will only get better from here.

The Future of Netbooks: More Details Surface on Intel's Next-Gen Atoms

The more I hear about Intel's next-gen Atom platform, the more excited I get. Bay Trail, if it lives up to the hype, will supercharge the netbook experience. More details on Bay Trail have been released in the past few days and weeks, and it is now viable to make predictions on the caliber and breadth of games that will work comfortably on the next generation of netbooks. Put on your sunglasses, 'cause the light at the end of the Intel-netbooks-suck-tunnel is getting close.

 

Naming

 

All of the codenames associated with Intel's upcoming Atoms can be quite confusing: Bay Trail, Valley View, Silvermont, Saltwell, agh! What do they all mean?

*Bonnell - name of the microarchitecture used in Diamondville and Pineview
*Saltwell - name of the microarchitecture used in Cedar Trail
*Silvermont - name of the microarchitecture used for the next generation; by far the superior of these three
*Valley View - name of the physical next-gen chip itself
*Bay Trail - name of the next-gen platform

Do these names really matter? No, at least not on this blog. Cedar Trail and Bay Trail are the only codenames I'll regularly use.

Processor

 

The most exciting part about Bay Trail, in my opinion, is the improvement in processor. The best Intel netbook processor today, the Atom N2800, is slightly better than a 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 HT from early 2004. Nowadays, the vast majority of games require some sort of Core 2 Duo-class processor, and Atom can't keep up. That's where Bay Trail comes in. Using a quad-core CPU, Bay Trail can run neck-and-neck with an equally clocked Core 2 Duo from mid to late 2008, as long as the application is optimized for 4 cores. That's a massive improvement over anything available in the past. With this kind of power, a Bay Trail Atom clocked at 1.8 GHz can take on games like Assassin's Creed 2 or Battlefield 3 (whether the graphics can keep up or not is another matter...). In addition to the increase in power, the new CPU's will also have new instruction sets, like SSE 4.2 and cryptography extensions. Sadly, HyperThreading is gone, but having a quad-core CPU more than makes up for that.

Source: Anandtech

 

Graphics

 

We already know that Bay Trail will be employ Intel's 7th generation graphics (the kind used in the iwhatever-3000 and 4000 series). The only things that tells us are that the feature set will be much better than all GMA's, well, ever, and that there won't be any more suckish drivers (we can hope). According to Anandtech, the graphics will consist of 4 execution units, only 25% of what Intel's HD Graphics 4000 has. Still, that's a big improvement compared to Cedar Trail. 4 Intel execution units are like 32 of AMD's, Nvidia's, or PowerVR's shader cores, and can deliver double the fillrate of the GMA 3600 at the same clock speed of 400 MHz. What does that mean? It means you can play the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Left 4 Dead series on the weakest of the Bay Trail chips, and it only gets better from there. Rift and Skyrim will play just fine on the strongest of the Bay Trail family. You still won't be able to play F1 2010 or Metro 2033, though, but still, having DirectX 11.1 and OpenGL 4 support on a netbook is going to be epic.

 

SKU's

 

Leaked information from CPU World indicates that there are 7 unique SKU's, 3 "standard temperature" and 4 "extended temperature" ones. Whether netbooks will use standard or extended temperature SKU's is unknown. All standard temperature parts get a dual-channel memory controller, for a maximum memory bandwidth of 17 GB/s (for netbooks), as well as GPU clocks of at least 300 MHz. One of the standard temperature SKU's will be a quad-core solution that supports speed boosts of up to 1.9 GHz or higher, with a TDP of 12 watts at most. The other 2 SKU's have unknown clock speeds, but one will be dual-core and one will be quad-core, and both will consume less than 10 watts of power.

 

Extended temperature SKU's come in 4 flavors: entry-level, mid-class, high-end, and premium. The entry-level will have a single core clocked somewhere between 1.3 and 1.6 GHz, with a 400 MHz GPU. The mid-class parts gets two cores clocked between 1.2 and 1.5 GHz with a GPU running at 533 MHz. Both of these SKU's only get a single-channel memory controller, which, if used in netbooks, will put out a little over 8.5 GB/s of bandwidth. The high-end SKU is also a dual core part, but is clocked between 1.5 and 1.7 GHz with a 667 MHz GPU. Finally, the premium solution will be quad-core and run between 1.7 and 2.0 GHz combined with a 700 MHz CPU. The high-end and premium SKU's will get a dual-channel memory controller, for a maximum bandwidth of, again, 17 GB/s. All extended temperature SKU's will consume less than 6 watts of energy.

 

The Future of Netbooks: Upcoming Chips from Intel and AMD

It's been said in many places that the netbook is dead. That may be true, but future processors from AMD and Intel could make the netbook drought a temporary hibernation. Intel finally seems to be focusing on jacking up the performance of its Atom processors (as opposed to further reducing power consumption), which will give AMD a run for its money and netbooks a desparately needed shot in the arm.

Intel: Bay Trail Promises Quad Core and 3x Better Graphics

Hot Hardware posted some leaked Intel slides on the 3rd of this month on their upcoming Bay Trail platform. To date, Intel has put the highest priority on shrinking the Atom's energy footprint, going from 8.5 W in the original Diamondville + 945GSE chipset combination to 5.6 W with Cedar Trail and the NM10 chipset (both worst-case scenarios), while making only small performance increases. Now, Intel is finally trying to clear the stigma of poor performance from its Atom line with performance-focused upgrades.

 The new Atoms, scheduled for release sometime in 2014, feature an architecture redesigned from the ground up. First, Intel is moving to a 22 nm process technology, which means the processor's transistors are smaller and packed together more densely. Secondly, the Bay Trail Atoms will be SoC's (system-on-a-chip). This means that the chipset, graphics, and CPU are all on the same die, which reduces power consumption and makes for a more efficient manufacturing process. The CPU itself will be a out-of-order quad-core solution, with burst speeds of up to 2.7 GHz. For an Atom, that's super fast, although I suspect the mobile parts (the ones netbook enthusiasts care about) won't be boosted that high. Current Atoms use in-order execution, which means the CPU runs all commands in the order they are presented, which reduces performance. Out-of-order execution allows Bay Trail to select the most efficient order to process data. The Bay Trail platform will support up to 8 GB of memory, the same as AMD's Brazos line. Memory speeds for Bay Trail-M remain at a maximum of 1066 MHz, just like Cedar Trail. It's unclear whether dual-channel memory will be supported. 

Perhaps the most exciting upgrade is to the graphics. Intel is leaving PowerVR graphics behind, and instead using their own HD Graphics processor. That means all of the graphics driver issues that haunt Cedar Trail are no more, and Intel netbooks will finally get the DirectX 11 and OpenGL 3.3 support they need. The clock rate for the new GPU has not been disclosed yet, but I suspect it won't matter, because Intel's HD Graphics on the market now are lightyears beyond any netbook GMA GPU. Also included is hardware-accelerated H.264, MPEG-2, and WMV encoding, as well as accelerated decoding/playback for more video formats than Cedar Trail supported.

Because the chipset will be fused with the processor, Bay Trail enjoys some small reductions in power consumption over previous generations of Atoms. Power consumption for Bay Trail-M is estimated to be between 4 and 6.5 W for low-end parts and 10 W for the high-end. Cedar Trail currently takes about 5 to 8 W.

AMD: Temash & Kabini Deliver Much Improved Performance

AMD demoed its upcoming Temash and Kabini APU's at CES 2013. According to Trusted Reviews, both designs are SoC's, just like Intel's Bay Trail.  Temash is intended to be used in tablets and hybrid tablets/laptops. It will replace the current-gen Hondo chips. (In case you're wondering why I've never mentioned Hondo before, it's because Hondo is nearly identical to the Brazos C-series chips.) AMD expects    Temash to have double the graphical power of Hondo, as well as dual-core and quad-core configurations. 

Kabini is set to replace today's Brazos 2.0 as the platform of choice for power-hungry netbook users (power-hungry is a relative term). Like Temash, it will have 2-core and 4-core options. Power consumption is expected to drop by 17% compared to Brazos 2.0, while delivering 50% more performance. Both Temash and Kabini are moving to 28nm processes, essential for competing with the threats of Intel and ARM. Also, AMD's APU's are reaching the market this year, far before Intel.

In-depth data on AMD's future platforms is not available at the moment, but I expect a major battle from ARM, AMD, and Intel. This competition will drive up performance and drive down prices, and that's a big win for consumers. The question is, can netbooks be revived by newer hardware?

We'll just have to wait and see.