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Intel Core Ultra 200V promises Arm-beating battery life without compatibility issues
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I couldn't find any clarification in the article but in guessing these are still x86_64 and from the description it seems like they've stacked a lot of different components into a single CPU core. Normally both those things would make it a big powerhouse so I'm not sure how it's going to beat arm on baterry which competes by having a smaller simpler ISA that doesn't need as much resources or complexity to process.
Extra components mean more specific hardware to complete each task. This more specific hardware can process the same data often faster and with less power consumption. The drawback is cost, complexity and these compose are only good for that one task.
CPUs are great because they are multipurpose and can do anything, given infinite time and storage. This flexibility means it isn’t as optimised.
People are not creating custom code to solve their own problems. They are running very common applications, using very common libraries for similar functions. So for the general user specific hardware for encryption, video codecs, networking etc will reduce power consumption and increase processing speed in a practical way.
Out of curiosity this wouldn't be automatically supported right? Like you'd need the os or dependent libraries to know about these special chips and take advantage of them for things like encryption for example. Is it common to define tailored hardware for this kind of functionality or is this intel trying to setup a very tailored mass market appeal product for laptops.
It's somewhat common. On the media encoding/decoding front, Intel has been doing this with stuff like QuickSync, AMD with AMF and Nvidia with NVENC.
You need software support to use them. But, it’s already common to support this. But it does take time to develop test and deploy this software.
The software will exist in kernels, drivers and libraries. Intel already supports things like this.
You may need to wait or use a bleeding edge version of your os to support these extra features.