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AMD Targets Web Pad & PDA Processor Market

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the something-else-inside dept.

According to this press release and this article from The Register , AMD has leveraged the technology portfolio of recently acquired Alchemy Semiconductor to introduce an ultra-low-power processor designed for sub-PC applications. The chip is based on the Alchemy Au1 core and features, among other things, an integrated LCD controller and a pair of Secure Digital controllers.

2 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Direct link to the product data book... by grnbrg · · Score: 5, Informative
    Since there is an annoying signup screen....



    http://www.alchemysemi.com/product_info/secure_dat a_book/Au1100_databook.pdf


    grnbrg

  2. Re:Why MIPS? by johnjones · · Score: 5, Informative

    well yes it is because the Pentium ISA is supposed to be obsolete.

    no one in their right mind would have predicted Intel or AMD would keep it going this long.
    (they want to kill it witness IA64)

    MIPS was actually designed for high performace useing a combination of compiler design and Hardware design it was a academic project and they got it right.

    ARM was designed to be simple take up as little space as possible for manufacturing and implementation (only 2 engineers did the work to start with) as a by product it means that now with moores law you have a product that burns very little power

    there are snags MIPS is more complicated than ARM but once you are over 100 MHz it pays dividends the amount of effort that Digital had to go through to do the StrongARM showed this and again with the StrongARM2 (Intel calls it the Xscale or PX250)

    the StrongARM design team did not really like the idea of working for Intel so they went off and created Alchemy and got a 500Mhz part with not much trouble they also stuck on 2 10/100Net ports USB client and Host I2C and serial a pretty nice chip but funding took a hit and they went looking for investors AMD saw the money that Intel was making of StrongARM and thought that little Alchemy was a winner.

    once AMD was on board they put a LCD contoller dumped 1 of the 2 network interfaces and bingo you have a better StrongARM than Xscale.

    in terms of tools

    what do you have on x86 ?
    gcc intel and lcc (plus globs of half baked assemblers)

    or ARM has: gcc, ARMCC, Greenhills and acorn

    compared to MIPS : gcc algor sgi (plus lots of academic compilers)

    oh and MS has .NET JIT's for ARM x86 IA64 and MIPS 32 Plus MIPS64

    java has about the same but with sparc and some hardware implementations

    regards

    john jones

    p.s. did I mention that MIPS is really the ONLY Volume 64bit RISC left after Intel butchery