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I adore the Surface Go form factor, but I'm baffled by its hardware choices, especially the CPU. To be frank, the 4415Y is godawful. Microsoft's last small tablet the Surface 3 used the Z8700. Let's compare them for illustrative purposes. The 4415Y is two years newer than the Z8700, but has twice as high an SDP, and has a Recommended Customer Price 4.35 times as high. The 4415Y Geekbenches at 2,000 and 4,000 for single and multi-threaded performance. The Z8700 comes in at 1,100 and 2,800. A two year newer CPU that costs over four times as much is just barely matching the Z8700 on per-watt performance.

I don't know what kind of fuckery has been going on at Intel with regards to their low-power chips but it isn't good.



Otoh the Go is usable for most purposes in terms of performance, whereas the previous small Surfaces really weren't. Perhaps faster SSD helped.


Intel's newer design that will come for the Surface Neo and such are also nightmares.

1 big core (from the regular Core architecture lineup) + 4 little cores (Atom), how the hell did they even want to make that?


> "1 big core (from the regular Core architecture lineup) + 4 little cores (Atom), how the hell did they even want to make that?"

I'm guessing the idea was adopted from ARM since they have had mixed-core chips for years now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE Probably the best known line of devices that use them is Samsung's Galaxy S series of smartphones.


Yes, those tend to/always have at least two big cores, not only one. Having only one complicates scheduling needlessly.


I also noticed that the processor has no AVX or AVX2. So no nice speedups for highly optimised avx code.




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