So calling conventions, etc aren’t defined. I don’t know really being only casually familiar with it. But there isn’t a specific standard so that peripherals all work the same, or have the same memory addresses, etc for a microcontroller. (It's worth noting that we had no way to run CoreMark on the M1's slower, less battery-hungry Icestorm cores only.). Implementations are left to implementors. CoreMark focuses solely on the core pipeline functions of a CPU, including basic read/write, integer, and control operations. I’m very curious about what would happen if we started including those $1 solar powered calculators in these performance per watt comparisons. Huang demonstrated the CPU—running on an Odroid board—to EE Times at 4.327GHz/0.8V and 5.19GHz/1.1V. I’m more concerned about the abstract meta stuff like interoperability versus lock-in than what happens at the FAB end of the problem. At an abstract level I don’t really care whether transcoding is done via hardware or software (ditto support for VMs and hooks or subsystem mechanisms for different OS to run at the same time). RISC-V doesn’t concern itself with operating system interoperability but to dictate that would be to limit implentors. As for implemenations not necessarily open this is why I kind of obsess the issue including transcoding and architectual solutions or interfacing for modular systems which allow for genuine mix and match solutions. Anyways if you want to end the discussion here that’s ok! At 4.25GHz, the Micro Magic can accomplish the same workload as the Ryzen 4700U with less than one-third the power required. WIRED Media Group Once you get to the FAB you are so caught up in proprietary processes you simply can’t be as open as you want (If I am reading you correctly), and if there were more restrictions placed on it then you wouldn’t see as many private companies adopting RISC-V so quickly (for example Western Digital). ... meshes, and infinity fabric) impact this measure of per-core performance… Then again, last time I said anything about an upcoming processor, I was off by a million miles, so what do I know? The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Can they scale to more demanding uses? No idea and the marketing puff doesn’t say. o Power management – autonomous dynamic voltage frequency scaling in coherent fabric, Literally, it measures the rate of computation that can be delivered by a computer for every watt of power consumed. Micro Magic intends to offer its new RISC-V design to customers using an IP licensing model. Higher results in the chart represent better value in terms of more performance per dollar. At 3GHz, that figure plummets to less than one-eighth the power required. Lobbyists and vested interests with deep pockets and now too many politicians spend more time leaning on marketing than creating good legal frameworks and policy based on the public interest. Unsurprisingly, both parts produced more performance per watt when exercised with one work thread for each available CPU thread. Better yet, the company itself isn't an unknown. This is the level I’m kind of discussing. Yield per watt is one of the elements that marketers commonly use to promote their products as a performance metric. Micro Magic's new CPU prototype is seen here running on an Odroid board. It may be RISC-V benefits from some extentions to facilitate co-existance of OS and portability. By Paul Alcorn 27 November 2020. You must login or create an account to comment. Don’t beat yourself up, the M1 did well in some benchmarks and poorly in others. I’m not getting into whataboutary or having words put in my mouth and as I think we’ve covered everything this is probably a good place to end discussion. With modern backend cloud implementations being available in the PS5 for some cases the fastpath will be over an external network.). As you said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The world’s fastest CPU core in low-power silicon; The best CPU performance per watt of any computer chip ; The world’s fastest integrated graphics in a personal computer; Breakthrough machine learning performance with the Apple Neural Engine; The M1 chip is available in the new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. Even aside from hardware considerations like GPU and LTE modem, creating an entire Android phone based on a non-ARM architecture is likely to be a much bigger undertaking. Micro Magic adviser Andy Huang claimed the CPU could produce 13,000 CoreMarks (more on that later) at 5GHz and 1.1V while also putting out 11,000 CoreMarks at 4.25GHz—the latter all while consuming only 200mW. What the Chinese are up to at a hardware level is a response but I’m fearing the Chinese are basically taking an open system and (like NVidia who are ten times worse than AMD/ATI ever were) are effectively closing it in practice. Now that we understood all that, the next step in order to better evaluate Micro Magic's claims was to run a few CoreMark benchmarks of our own. Well you can see some of that discussed in the FAQ, and you can get into the weeds by looking at the implementer’s guide. PC Apps; New RISC-V CPU claims recordbreaking efficiency per watt. Getting the raw performance scores was considerably easier than getting truly comparable power readings. Micro Magic Inc.—a small electronic design firm in Sunnyvale, California—has produced a prototype CPU that is several times more efficient than world-leading competitors, while retaining reasonable raw performance. Jim Salter PassMark Software has delved into the thousands of benchmark results that PerformanceTest users have posted to its web site and produced nineteen Intel vs AMD CPU charts to help compare the relative speeds of the different processors. Part of the difficulty in evaluating Micro Magic's claim for its new CPU lies in figuring out just what a CoreMark is and how many of them are needed to make a fast CPU. A chip on its shoulders — Apple dishes details on its new M1 chip Apple claims 8-core SoC offers world’s best performance per watt. Fair comment. I have some major reservations about all of these claims, mostly because of the lack of benchmarks that more accurately track real-world usage. The politics is a bit of an issue I agree although the law is a lot clearer so easily subject to technical discussion and there is a fair degree of case law and science to lean on. Included in these lists are CPUs designed for servers and workstations (such as Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC/Opteron processors), desktop CPUs … I tested the Apple and AMD CPUs both single-threaded and multithreaded when checking power efficiency. Later the same week, Micro Magic announced the same CPU could produce over 8,000 CoreMarks at 3GHz while consuming only 69mW of power. Where the balance lies is a question between RISC-V, OS vendors and IHVs, and consumers and I think there is some scope for discussion. “World’s best CPU performance per watt”: Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip and 16GB of RAM. Sorry but I don’t get what you are saying. I think this really needs a technical vision articulating examining what is and isn’t possible then a deeper look at the gotchas and whether vendors will cooperate or not, and the use and abuse of patents and copyright to stop an advance in this area. The chart below compares Videocard value (performance / price) using the lowest price from our affiliates. Performance per watt on Micro Magic's new CPU is eye-popping as compared to typical systems. New RISC-V CPU claims recordbreaking performance per watt. I’ve been involved on a bit of this stuff for the printed SolarPV, in that sector the target is $1/m² but the cost of what you can do in that square meter doesn’t rise proportionally with the density of devices on the film. The 5nm M1 system-on-a-chip (SoC) features an 8-core CPU, which the company claims delivers the best performance-per-watt of any processor on the market, and up to … The numbers support that and do show ARM is more efficient in doing the tasks at hand, in this case Geekbench 5. Read our affiliate link policy. In 2004, it was reborn under its original name by the original founders—Mark Santoro and Lee Tavrow, who originally worked at Sun and led the team that developed the 300MHz SPARC microprocessor. At the power-efficient 3GHz clockrate, the Micro Magic CPU is nearly three times faster than, for example, SiFive's Freedom U540 CPU running single-threaded. An open and competitive architecture won’t happen unless there is this involvement. There was a universal core you could depend on with everything else being an extention. For some or all of this to work via a fastpath or slowpath (could be hardware or software) the overall concepts and systems and regulations which enable this need to be worked out and specified. For example: The simplicity of the design—RISC-V requires roughly one-tenth the opcodes that modern ARM architecture does—further simplifies manufacturing concerns, since RISC-V CPU designs can be built in shuttle runs, sharing space on a wafer with other designs. Join the Ars Orbital Transmission mailing list to get weekly updates delivered to your inbox. I don't have access to anything nearly as fine-grained as turbostat for the Apple M1, so for that platform I took whole-system power draw at the wall and just plain subtracted the reading at desktop idle from the sustained reading while under test. The Micro Magic CPU is, for the moment, single-core and single-threaded—although Huang says it could "easily" be built as a 25-core part. I do agree with your comments on why the Chinese are using RISC-V and other CPUs and what they are used for. If we use the EMBC's published single-core score for the Snapdragon 820 along with Anandtech's single-core CPU power test result, we get about 16,000 CoreMarks per watt. - Dec 4, 2020 11:15 am UTC. ... offers big improvements in performance per watt … If you've got access to a Linux system, it's pretty easy to download, compile, and run CoreMark yourself. Small world. Ars Technica - Jim Salter ... 10 Calming Gifts for People With 2020 Anxiety Mashable. AMD claims that in comparison to Intel’s Core i7-1065G7 processor, the Ryzen Mobile 4000 Series will be able to deliver up to a 30% increase in graphics performance. I always thought OpenGL got a lot of things right. Today, Micro Magic announced another breakthrough, promising “the world’s highest performance/power 64-bit RISC-V core at 110,000 CoreMarks/Watt.” The Micro Magic RISC-V processor used in today’s 3GHz demo appears to be essentially the same as the similarly unnamed core in the EETimes demo running at 5GHz and 13,000 CoreMarks at 1.1V. While we've seen a screenshot of an 8,200 CoreMark score, and we've seen a 69mW power reading, it's not entirely clear that the power reading was representative of the entire benchmark run. But I still don’t think you get it, RISC-V is a ISA, just an ISA. But when we factor in power efficiency, things get crazy. Later the same week, Micro Magic announced the same CPU could produce over 8,000 CoreMarks at 3GHz while consuming only 69mW of power. With that said, it would be an enormous undertaking to port—for example—an entire smartphone ecosystem, such as commercial Android, to a new architecture. The Mac mini (M1, 2020) is the first desktop Mac to feature Apple’s very own M1 chip. CPU Benchmark Hierarchy 2020: Intel and AMD Processors Ranked. I am not saying anything about politics, but their policy of favoring home grown processors internally is creating great incentive to be competative. I hear what you are saying, but I think you are looking for RISC-V to be more than it is, and that it wants to be. For the vast majority of use cases there’s no real need to step away from. RISC-V is one of the ways they are doing that, along with RISC-V, MIPS, ARM, and x86. Performance per watt refers to the ratio of peak CPU performance to average power consumed using select industry standard benchmarks. In other words, Micro Magic's prototype CPU is both significantly faster and tremendously more power-efficient than a reasonably modern and still very capable smartphone CPU.