Small world. The x86 memory model is more strict and emulating it in software is inefficient. What is performance per watt? Ars Technica ... Micro Magic's new CPU offers decent performance with record-breaking efficiency. But isn’t it OK for those to be a subset of the whole, so consumers can choose, and still know that code will run on those processors transparently as proprietary implementations? I am not saying anything about politics, but their policy of favoring home grown processors internally is creating great incentive to be competative. I benchmarked it against the PineBook Pro. You say that you don’t care about implementation, which is fair enough given that many users don’t care either. Then again, last time I said anything about an upcoming processor, I was off by a million miles, so what do I know? You’ve explained some of the detailed issues which helps but there’s two issues here. But there isn’t a specific standard so that peripherals all work the same, or have the same memory addresses, etc for a microcontroller. Yield per watt is one of the elements that marketers commonly use to promote their products as a performance metric. I’m very curious about what would happen if we started including those $1 solar powered calculators in these performance per watt comparisons. (It's worth noting that we had no way to run CoreMark on the M1's slower, less battery-hungry Icestorm cores only.). Ad Choices. Literally, it measures the rate of computation that can be delivered by a computer for every watt of power consumed. There is also the open source Hummingbird processors that are aiming at the Cortex-M space. Sign up or login to join the discussions! In judging AMD vs Intel CPU performance per watt, It's impossible to overstate the importance of having the densest process node paired with … I’m more concerned about the abstract meta stuff like interoperability versus lock-in than what happens at the FAB end of the problem. o New Willow Cove CPU core with significant frequency uplift leveraging 10nm SuperFin technology advancements. To borrow from (classic) OpenGL again you have core functionality which is good enough for everyday use. Micro Magic was originally founded in 1995 and was purchased by Juniper Networks for $260 million. However somebody obviously does have to care about this stuff and many of us here on osnews do find these things important. So I can see this chip stuff in the lower power market becoming very dominant, provided the applications can keep the processors cool. But let me try and summarize as best as I can for you: It’s a modular instruction set architecture that can describe everything from an 8 bit to a 128 bit computer, but the well defined ISAs are for 16, 32, an 64 bit systems. Article. This rate is typically measured by performance on the LINPACK benchmark when trying to compare between computing systems: an example using this is the Green500 list of supercomputers. I’m bothered about the general purpose baseline versus the use case specific implementation issues. 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. We first noticed Micro Magic's claims earlier this week, when EE Times reported on the company's new prototype CPU, which appears to be the fastest RISC-V CPU in the world. ... meshes, and infinity fabric) impact this measure of per-core performance… At it’s high end it’s as capable as those processors so it would have a decent use case in the same space as what you’d use Pi’s or Rock64 boards on. For the Apple, I only had access to whole-system power draw, so I subtracted the "desktop idle" power draw from the "under test" power draw. Huang 5.19GHz/1.1V.Later Ryzen 4700u SiFive Mark Santoro Lee Tavrow We're Ars You must login or create an account to comment. The RISC-V ISA—unlike x86, ARM, and even MIPS—is open and provided under royalty-free licenses. Better yet, the company itself isn't an unknown. I gave my Ryzen and Apple processors the benefit of every possible doubt when generating the above charts—I used core power (not total package power) on the Ryzen 4700U and ran tests with the Gnome3 desktop shut down. I always thought OpenGL got a lot of things right. Does anyone have any ideas what? No idea and the marketing puff doesn’t say. At 5GHz, it outruns all four of the SiFive's cores. Ars may earn compensation on sales from links on this site. I’m sure someone will find a use. It's a deliberately simplified CPU benchmarking tool released by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, intended to be as platform-neutral and simple to build and use as possible. “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. And you can find that at the RISC-V website, I won’t google that for you. One AMD Ryzen Embedded V2000 Series processor can provide twice the multi-threaded performance-per-watt, up to 30 percent better single-thread CPU performance and up to 40 percent better graphics performance over the previous generation. I expect government regulators would have an eye on this too if public discussion got enough traction. I’ve been trying for so long to encourage everyone to be patient and form their opinions based on data rather than marketing claims. If your questions are indeed about governance, you have done a bad job of explaining what you mean. 3x higher performance per watt. 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. 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. There would be other none technical considerations of course but I would expect anyone publishing this to consult and fold in the relevant sections. 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. So calling conventions, etc aren’t defined. ... promising that the M1 will offer the world's best CPU performance per watt. With both M1 and this there is a reason for healthy skepticism, even if the results ultimately prove out in the end. At 3GHz, that figure plummets to less than one-eighth the power required. 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. This can be annoying when you try to have an objective conversation, but that is human nature I suppose, haha. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Ars Technica Addendum (effective 8/21/2018). https://nequalsonelifestyle.com/2020/12/06/mm-riscv-vs-rock64-arm/. We need to give implementers the freedom to experiment and innovate, and RISC-V gives them a compatible ISA to do that. Because RISC-V doesn’t dictate the implementation, extra instructions for emulation aren’t guaranteed to matter. At this point I’d be happy if someone with influence produce a discussion document covering things like acces to instruction sets, interoperability with things like transcoding, the OS and VM layers, support for end users investments in software, the use of escrow and barriers such as copy protection and copyright. For people with use case and power envelopes which match the capabilities either would be useful if Arstechnica tests are accurate. The Linux operating system already supports RISC-V architecture—so for headless or near-headless controllers that simply need to deliver decent performance paired with extreme power efficiency, Micro Magic's new CPU is likely most of the way there. 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. With modern backend cloud implementations being available in the PS5 for some cases the fastpath will be over an external network.). In computing, performance per watt is a measure of the energy efficiency of a particular computer architecture or computer hardware. The nitty gritty of transcoding and subsystems (and VMs) cooperating with each other to anyone can run anything they like without vendor lock-in and forced obsolescence is a technical thing. As you said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. An open and competitive architecture won’t happen unless there is this involvement. We would do the same if we were in their shoes. Ars Technica summarises and looks at the various claims made by Micro Magic about their RISC-V core. At roughly a quarter the performance of world-leading x86 and ARM mobile processors, the Micro Magic CPU doesn't sound like much yet. Sorry but I don’t get what you are saying. Higher results in the chart represent better value in terms of more performance per dollar. I think we’re talking at cross purposes or have different goals or priorities in mind. o New Xe graphics with up to 96 execution units (EUs) with significant performance-per-watt efficiency improvements. None of this made much of a dent in the Micro Magic's commanding lead in power efficiency. But I still don’t think you get it, RISC-V is a ISA, just an ISA. New RISC-V CPU claims recordbreaking performance per watt Micro Magic's new CPU offers decent performance with record-breaking efficiency. Micro Magic Inc.—a small digital design agency in Sunnyvale, California—has ... Home PC Apps New RISC-V CPU claims recordbreaking efficiency per watt. The numbers support that and do show ARM is more efficient in doing the tasks at hand, in this case Geekbench 5. That's triple the efficiency of the Ryzen 4700u running single-threaded and a little better than par with it when the Ryzen's running an optimally multithreaded workload. I do agree with your comments on why the Chinese are using RISC-V and other CPUs and what they are used for. This is all they don’t tell you. ... offers big improvements in performance per watt … In addition to building the operating system itself—not just the kernel, but drivers for all hardware from GPU to Wi-Fi to LTE modem, and more—third-party app developers would need to recompile their own applications for the new architecture as well. Everyone has their opinions and musings. The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EMBC) is a group with wide industry representation: Intel, Texas Instruments, ARM, Realtek, and Nokia are a few of its more notable and easily recognizable members. They add one or more layers of printed SolarPV to conventional PV to boost performance. To do so, one needs a computer or a laptop, and most computers in the world are powered by either an Intel/AMD CPU. In that SolarPV sector it’s more about heat management and durability when exposed to UV. All rights reserved. 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. Seeed studios sells various versions of them (and a rather cheap FPGA board if you want to experiment yourself). All of this sounds very exciting—Micro Magic's new prototype is delivering solid smartphone-grade performance at a fraction of the power budget, using an instruction set that Linux already runs natively on. The 2020 MacBook Air is also powered by Apple's new M1 processor which are Arm-based CPUs. Micro Magic has provided figures—and in one case, a screenshot—for performance at 3GHz, 4.25GHz, and 5GHz. People often take such things for granted, but if too few people take an active role to ensure open platforms remain viable, they can become marginalized and become niche/”second class citizens” in the real world. Scenario 1: Apple builds an ARM CPU just as fast as an x86 CPU, and is able to leverage its own ecosystem to deliver a modest improvement in performance per watt… Jim Salter I still have an Apple M1 Mac Mini on hand, as well as a Ryzen 7 4700U-powered Acer Swift 3, so those were my test systems for comparison. Benchmark results and pricing is reviewed daily. Core performance with Nuvia’s Phoenix. 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. I tested the Apple and AMD CPUs both single-threaded and multithreaded when checking power efficiency. Still, this is an exciting development. with 103 posters participating, including story author. It may be RISC-V benefits from some extentions to facilitate co-existance of OS and portability. The AMD Embedded Ryzen V2000 family features up to eight 'Zen 2' CPU cores and seven GPU compute units, built on a 7nm process. Not only does the new design appear to perform well while massively breaking efficiency records, it's doing so with a far more ideologically open design than its competitors. Included in these lists are CPUs designed for servers and workstations (such as Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC/Opteron processors), desktop CPUs … So am I, but times change. I’m a bit sceptical of RISC-V as it seems more of an American thing and wonder if pushing RISC-V is less about technical and equity issues and more about who ultimately controls and influences the CPU platform. All we needed to do here was clone its GitHub repository, then issue a make command—optionally, with arguments XCFLAGS="-DMULTITHREAD=8 -DUSE_FORK=1" if we want to test on multiple threads/cores at once. (In some cases CPU was actually faster than the hardware renderer due to the technology of the time. PC Apps; New RISC-V CPU claims recordbreaking efficiency per watt. This is true. There was a universal core you could depend on with everything else being an extention. 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. I’m just happy being able to broach the subject. Implementations are potentially going to vary within a single semiconductor company, and this is what we want. Extraordinary claims requite extraordinary evidence, and I feel like some vague photos just doesn’t to the trick of convincing me. 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. 2020 is the year of a global pandemic that forced many of us to work from home. You need to seperate the meta issues from business decisions from implementation. 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. Ars Technica - Jim Salter ... 10 Calming Gifts for People With 2020 Anxiety Mashable. It is indeed good advice to study the data and the rules behind what generated the data. Apple specifically needed backwards compatibility in order to run their customer’s proprietary mac software, but not everyone is as tied down to x86 software compatibility. Based on the idea that Ampere Computing has to offer at least a 20 percent price/performance advantage at the chip level compared to the best that Intel and AMD can throw at the cost per performance per watt equation that dominates the buying decisions of the hyperscalers and cloud builders that Ampere Computing is targeting. For a broader context there are software versus fastpath issues where a given OpenGL function may have been fully or only partially implemented in typically faster graphics card hardware . What you are talking about is implementation… I think. Two charts below (currently on-sale and all-time value) displays the top Videocards in terms of value. We first noticed Micro Magic’s claims earlier this week, when EE Times reported on the company’s new prototype CPU, which appears to be the fastest RISC-V CPU in the world. I’m content to leave thinsg there for now. Join the Ars Orbital Transmission mailing list to get weekly updates delivered to your inbox. This specifically avoids most effects of system differences in memory, I/O, and so forth. 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). November 30, 2020. gokul nath. But is ... What is performance per watt? RISC-V endorsed the Wishbone bus for systems on a chip but vendors aren’t required to use it. RISC-V could implement an x86 compatibility mode like apple, but for users like myself though, I don’t really see much benefit in emulating x86 code and I suspect most people who find RISC-V appealing aren’t that interested in emulating x86 either. This may well be the same tactic for the processors, you can imagine an array of these devices working at low bandwidth/demand feeding a centralised conventional chip with heavily curated data, in effect doing all the housekeeping which could massively improve performance and efficiency. https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/08/21/alibaba-on-the-bleeding-edge-of-risc-v-with-xt910/. For the vast majority of use cases there’s no real need to step away from. Huang demonstrated the CPU—running on an Odroid board—to EE Times at 4.327GHz/0.8V and 5.19GHz/1.1V. Here is the thing, you keep asking low level questions (or ones that can only be answered in a low level way because of what RISC-V actually is), and then get seemingly upset when we answer that way. 17. 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. At the maximally power-efficient 3GHz clockrate, the Micro Magic CPU scores about one-fourth the CoreMarks of either the Ryzen 4700u or Apple M1. Switzerland recently had its own scandal when it turned out one Swiss supplier of backdoored security products was owned by US and German intelligence. As for whether it is good for all things all the time we don’t really know so comparing them to currents major CPUs isn’t an exact comparison. RISC-V is one of the ways they are doing that, along with RISC-V, MIPS, ARM, and x86. Jim Salter - Dec 4, 2020 11:15 am UTC. Oops. I think you have to just look at the spec or trust me when I say the core spec defines a thoroughly modern CPU with feature sets on par with any modern CPU, I also think you need to define what you mean by transcoding, because it feels alien to my understanding of the term, After a lot of thought I suspect by transcoding you mean additional instructions to facilitate emulating other architectures (for example x64) vit a JIT or AOT compiler, and yes there is working group J that is looking into that, however that may not be the right approach. The chart below compares Videocard value (performance / price) using the lowest price from our affiliates. But when we look at M1, we see a massive 3x improvement in performance per watt. I lament that this did not happen with ARM and for better or worse this leaves x86 (with all of it’s problems) as the friendliest FOSS platform to date. GCC and LLVM collaborated on what they wanted from a compiler implementation level, but anyone is fine to define their own (as with any other CPU).