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AMD Stirs Athlon Into Geode Embedded Soup
An anonymous reader writes "AMD, which in recent months has gained ground against Intel in the battle for the desktop, today announced the addition of a line of high-performance, low-power embedded processors to its Geode embedded x86 processor family. The new processors will be known as the "Geode NX 1500@6W" and the "Geode NX 1750@14W," reflecting a new naming convention based on relative performance and power consumption. The Geode NX 1500@6W processor operates at 1GHz and the Geode NX 1750@14W operates at 1.4GHz. The two new embedded processors are essentially identical to AMD's Mobile Athlon processors, including packaging, but with tweaks to process technology and transistor selections that result in lower power consumption at reduced clock rates." If it meant better battery life, I could live with a processor this slow in a laptop, but according to the linked story, AMD doesn't see much of a market for that.
Ok, check me on this. "The Geode NX 1500@6W processor operates at 1GHz and the Geode NX 1750@14W operates at 1.4GHz." However, 1500 x 1.4 (since the 1500 is 1Ghz and the 1750 is 1.4Ghz) = 2100. So shouldn't the 1750 be the 2100, or are they no longer trying to be even internally consistent?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
You could live with a processor that slow, in a laptop, you guess?
I'm running a slower processor than that on my desktop, and am still perfectly happy since I have lots of RAM and never close the programs I use. What more does one need?
Or maybe the fearless editor runs Gentoo? Silly Gentoo kids...
What? I don't get the giga hyper active stuff... T00 ADD?HD
I'm hoping that the power numbers are a bit more accurate than the speed numbers...
"well, it's got the performance of a six watt chip..." just wouldn't do it for me.
I see a world market for about 4 battery sipping laptops.
It seems as if there has been a lack of proofreading for stories lately.
ex: "AMD doesn't see much a market for that"
I'd love these things in PDA style devices.
Add a decent amount of ram/storage and you can have voice recognition system, store your white/yellow pages for reference, store your digital photos (and edit them), store a high resolution map of your camping trip, etc....
There is no such thing as too much power. If you have enough power you don't need that much screen space. If you could use most of the functions of a PDA by actually speaking to it (like to another human), wouldn't you?
And here I am, doing most of my computing these days on a 500MHz laptop. It's running a modern OS: OSX 10.3. And X11.
The only trouble I have is one or two web sites that bring my 1.5GHz desktop to its knees to render, full of tables as they are.
Stupid lameness filter...
... like the body or the subject!)
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment
Erm, I thought that the Geode was a National Semiconductor SOC product... have they sold this line of products to AMD?
At $65 and $55, they're a LOT cheaper than the Pentium M (I can't find one for under $195), although they are aimed at different markets.
My server
How do these new processors compare in power usage to their athlon mobile counterparts? How about compared to the desktop machines?
If they use less energy, does that also mean that these processors will give off less heat?
Intel phrases Itanium into a complicated metaphor.
Unknown host pong.
English adapts, expands and exploits. When it comes to surrendering I think we know in which language we're speaking.
In socialist France this joke explains itself.
Perhaps I am stating the obvious; but, I am very glad AMD is around to keep Intel sharp and vice versa. IMHO if Intel were the only game in town inovation would go down and price would go up. Every product announcement AMD and Intel make warms my heart. As consumers we benefit.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
Processor makers have made their living by speeding up their chips at a Moore's Law pace with faith that the latest Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, Photoshop and 3d shoot-em-up game will find a use for the newfound power.
But really, I think the processor market is about to hit a wall where faster really doesn't speed things up much. Afterall, you need hardly any proc power to browse the WWW, read e-mail, or do IM chat. Sure, some people want "desktop replacement" laptops, but others want their laptop to just do some simple things.
I think the next killer app processors are a generation that use less power and run cooler. The only problem is that consumers have been trained to only ask "How many MegaHertz does it have?" when shopping for processors. Therefore, there's going to be quite a bit of marketing work that needs to be done before such chips become viable.
....'tis only what happens when good ideas go down the hall to that horrible place called: "marketing".
Hung over from last night's lounge soire and still buffing that shiny new degree in "marketing"...stupid ideas (and numbering schemes) are rampant, especially in light of competing with Intel.
I am typing this on a 867 MHz G4 PowerBook and it seems plenty fast - no urge to upgrade at all (unless Steve unleashes the G5 PB but that's another story). 6W for a CPU is awesome though. This G4 is ~20 W and the laptop lives anywhere from 2.5 to 4 hr.
Geode NX 1500@6W" and "Geode NX 1750@14W
Hello... whatever happened to marketing making things easy for consumers? Why not just go back to the K6, K7 route. Hey, you know the next K is better than the previous K.
Transmeta already has Effecon out which runs at similar speeds and wattage. The Sharp MM20 has the Transmeta chip inside. It only weighs 2 lbs and is very thin.
Why are all the "eco-friendly" processors only released for notebooks. How about releasing a nice low power chip for the desktop?
It wasn't long ago that 1GHz was the magic number that both Intel and AMD were trying to hit. (AMD won).
The performance of a 1GHz Athlon is plenty for a home server, and probably just fine for 90% of desktop PC users. My stepfather noticed zero difference moving from an Athlon 800 T-bird to an Athlon 1600+ Palomino, but it would be very noticeable for many people to not have the noise of a CPU cooling fan. Passively cooling a 6W processor would be a breeze (no pun intended).
As an added bonus, the extremely low power usage and low heat output (thus lower air conditioning bills) would allow the chip to eventually pay for itself. I do hope that these chips are eventually made available through normal retail channels such as Newegg.com, since Transmeta products have certainly not been a choice outside of small laptops and diskless X terminals.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I've got an Epia M10000 but the only way to upgrade will involve me buying a new Epia mobo/processor in a single package. I would love to have a Geode-based chip and mini-itx motherboard that could be upgraded separately.
@6W what they mean is they consume 22KW, but thats like 6W of Intel power :P
-Jason
Maybe this might open the door to more third parties in the mini-ITX field. None of my machines with the mini-ITX have fans on them, and they work very well for dedicated units.
I'm going to be replacing the last of my oldschool computers - a p100 dating from 1995 - with a VIA miniITX soon because of the power consumption and reliability gains, to say nothing of the space savings.
Great for little video and MAME computers as well.
..don't panic
In my experence, these low power chips never do well The National Semiconductor Geode, The Transmetia Crusoe, The Cyrix GXm and GX1. These low power chips had horrible performance per clock cycle, and in the end just made no sense for embedded devices, they generated as much heat as Intel and AMD chips 2x as fast. I doubt that AMD can pull off a low power processor that ISN'T made for laptops.
Yes, it would sure be nice to see this improvement moved to the laptop; but don't forget, all of the other power consumption (hard drive, lighted display, support chips, wireless NIC, CD/DVD and so on stays the same). So the improvement in laptop battery life isn't as great as you might think. Still, any improvement would be very welcome.
And be honest, if you could buy a 1 ghz laptop or a 1.4 ghz laptop for the same price, wouldn't you really buy the 1.4 gig system, even though the CPU ate more power? Of course, if the faster chip could be stepped down to the slower speeds and take power usage with it, then that would be the best of both worlds. But we really need better support here from the support chip and notebook makers, as well as from AMD.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Think embedded systems, like printers, server appliances, etc.
It's an extreme low-power Athlon XP intended for things like I do for a living. I'd love to see a PC-104+ system or an EBX with PC-104+ expansion with one of these on the board. I'd love to see something along those lines without need of a fansink and extended temperature ranges.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I have a small box running 24/7. It doesn't do much, but it still needs to run 24/7. I have been using a Via C3 for over a year now with very happy results. The only downside being that a 800Mhz C3 is well... slow. Now to be able to put a AMD at twice the speed (4x the performance?) and still use that level of power is fantastic and I will be first in line to check these out. At 6W Fanless CPU heatsinks are a reality. Compined with a good case and a quiet hard drive and you have a little box you can run 24/7 without worrying about power or noise.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Reducing CPU consumption down to 5W is not a great win when you still have backlit screens and hard disks chewing up power. It's a simple application of Amdahl's law.
Intel CPUs use a lot of power at full load, but rather less when sleeping. The typical client machine spends a lot of time idle. Probably the heaviest loaded laptops are those running Gentoo, and even those are not building absolutely all the time. As I write this now, my machine's CPU is probably asleep except for a couple of ms after I hit a key.
On the other hand the screen and backlight stay on all the time, and the disk stays spun up most of the time.
This is one reason why Crusoe was less successful than people hoped. For laptops, CPU power consumption is just not the dominant factor.
If passive screens and solid-state storage became popular for laptops then CPU consumption would matter again. In devices like PDAs where there is no hard disk and the screen is not always backlit, then low-power CPUs are more popular.
Even then, power usage in flat-out benchmarks doesn't matter. The most important thing is that the CPU and memory should use little power when idle. If you run a CPU benchmark on your laptop or PDA it is expected that the battery will go flat quickly. So, don't do that when you're disconnected.
I'd like to use one of these as a desktop PC as well. My PC is a workstation but I play occasional games on it as well. I have a 9600 XT video card in my P3 system and it works very well. I could see the 1750@14W being adequte upgrade and I'd be able to get rid of some fans in my system.
I think even if AMD can't beat Intel in sales numbers, they're cornering them in certain markets. The cost/performance/heat ratio is great.
If it meant better battery life, I could live with a processor this slow in a laptop, but according to the linked story, AMD doesn't see much a market for that.
A month ago I was in the market for a notebook, and I saw the regular P4 books, Celerons, Centrinos and the Apples, and I thought having an Apple would be great.. but the MHz for the price was just too low. Could I live with a 1GHz iBook I wondered?
A month later, I'm here sitting in my garden at 1.37am with my 1GHz iBook, and honestly can't work out why I'd need those extra MHz. I program, do some MySQL stuff, SSH a lot, play MP3s.. it seems the 1GHz copes with this excellently.
So, you could say I'm a convert.. not just to Apple or OS X, but to the concept that more megahertz aren't always needed. Unfortunately PC diehards (as I was) find this a really hard barrier to break through, and want the 2-3GHz crazy stuff going on in their notebooks. Well, I know my battery here will last me till at least 6am (though it's a bit too cold to stay out here till then, I think!) and I know it's fast enough for everything I want to do.
Could AMD convince people of this? Sadly I don't think so.
Many/most of the power saving tweaks involve taking away stuff that has been used to make Pentiums fast. This means that a Geode is unlikely to perform as fast as a similarly clocked Pentium.
Now this is a whole new architecture, but on the previous (current) generation of Geodes, I found that a 200MHz ARM was faster than a 300MHz Geode. The ARM also only used about 10-15% the power that the Geode was using and was also smaller, lighter etc... Geodes were quite popular in embedded systems but this has largely stagnated. I really struggle to see how Geode will make a comeback.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
OK, how much would it cost a portable console with a Geode NX 1500@6W, Nforce 3 chipset, 256MB DDR400 and a 20GB hard drive. A built-in 5-inch LCD screen supports resolutions up to 720 x 480? Make it run linux from the bios to avoid the Windows tax and to get ultra fast boot times.
IT reminds me of marti in back to the future...
If it meant better battery life, I could live with a processor this slow in a laptop, but according to the linked story, AMD doesn't see much of a market for that.
That's faster than my desktop you insensitive clod! What the hell are you doing on a laptop that needs this?
No. A PDA is not a "li'l buddy", but a device - a tool. I don't talk to my wrench, screwdriver, or hammer - it's just not practical. There are too many things that require physical manipulation to make useful things happen.
itomato
Ouch!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Whilst this is a development board, if you are into mini-iTX but want more power than the VIA C3 currently provides (i.e., you want this AMD Geode processor) without extra noise that higher-wattage processors (there is a mini-iTX P4 board out there somewhere) then ...
w nl oadableAssets/31760a-nxdb1500_devbrd.pdf
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/Do
It surely can't be long until a motherboard maker creates and markets one of these at a cheap reasonable price.
Um... the Press Release doesn't mention Laptops.... anywhere!
:) Seriously, folks... they're intended to power the next generation of "Dumb Terminals" and thin clients. 1.4ghz is severe overkill for a thin client, although AMD's prices are highly competitive.
These processors are meant for non-computers
The article also mentions a MIPS chip AMD plans to put out to be targeted at the Handheld PC market. Imagine a 1.4ghz Pocket PC?
Think of the other possibilities....
Routers would definitely be able to make use of such a chip.
As color laser printeres get faster, faster processors will be needed to run them. Right now, the fastest top out at around 400mhz for the very high end models.
Cisco could definitely use something like this in their routers.
Set-top boxes could also benefit, although, TiVo has demonstrated that you can do a lot with a little (the Series1 Tivos ran on a 75mhz PowerPC)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
...looks like it doesn't execute (NX) a thing.
In fast businesses like the consultancy world, a fast and powerful laptop is at the core of the workings. In my last work in that business, we had top-notch IBM laptops which enabled us to move around internally and externally, running the systems we created locally and on servers, and as most developers know, this is paramount to fast development. I'd rather have a powerful laptop than a powerful desktop anyday. And it isn't about battery-life; it is more about moving your environment over distances and then plug back in again.
-- Home, James - it doesn't matter where that thing has b
..I would be worried right about now.
-
Moore's Law says that soon, AMD will have the entire datasheet encoded into the part name. There will be no need to look at external documentation at all to find out power consumption, or packaging, or pin count, or the instruction set manual. It'll all be right there in the name of the chip.
"I think there is a market for 5 computers in the whole world." (1943)
Thomas Watson, President from IBM
How about Games?
It wouldn't hurt to get rid of bloatware, either. Mozilla Firefox may be a brilliant marketing campaign, but frankly it's not that much lighter than the full suite. And Win2K boot is unbearable compared to Linux...
Sadly the nice things about laptop drives (low power and noise level, spin-up-down life) are hard to preserve as you increase speed.
But a 1GHz Geode has more processing grunt than a 200MHz ARM. The article states that the 500MHz AMD Geode consumes 1W!
Depends on your application.
Personally for my cool low-power beowulf cluster I'd choose a bunch of dual-core 1GHz RM9222 with Hyperthreading and integrated 160Gbps multi-port Packet Switch 12W is a bargain
With so many OSS people using AMD CPUs, and uCLinux heating up, has anyone gotten Linux to run on the 3COM Audrey? It looks like the bottleneck is running LinuxBIOS on the HW. Who can breathe (after)life into this dying platform?
--
make install -not war
As I remember, the 5x86 fit into the same form factor as the Intel 486.
Cyrix later integrated VGA and sound onto the same die as the 5x86 and called it the "MediaGX" (I think).
Cyrix wasn't able to scale their 6x86 up beyond 400MHz (it was very CISCish in design). How were NS or AMD able to scale the inferior design so far?
The most applicable domain for these (besides non-pc devices) is quiet computing. I'd definitely settle for a slower CPU, if it didn't need a fan. I already spend extra money on every PC I get, for quieter fans. Products like this can make my PCs even quieter.
Peter
From the article:
AMD provides development boards, which are intended to serve as "complete hardware and software" reference designs for embedded applications, for all of its Geode embedded processors.
Could someone who has worked in the area of embedded processors explain a little more about what a development board provides?
Thanks
...we're probably just as bad, simply in some other field of business. When it's too complex, we look to a simpler metric. The star example is insurance. Do you know the terms of your insurance? Compared to the other offers you recieved? With 99,99% certainty, you don't.
In most cases, you simplify to "price" and a "performance" metric. You can pay X$ and get Y performance, or 2X$ and get ?.?Y performance. Or in many cases like e.g. toothpaste, replace performance with "brand value". I think the marketing term is "substitution variable".
If your market is heavily driven by that, only focus on that and screw the rest. Why you e.g. see multi-GHz machines choked by no RAM. They know better, but the consumers don't. They want it simple, you make it simple for them. Capitalism at its simplest, deliver what the consumer wants, not what he needs.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I never thought I would see the day when a 1.4 gig processor would be described as "slow"...
I wonder if they do SMP, or can be made to do SMP by cutting a couple of pins? With six watt power consumption you could build a big SMP box and use less power than a single Xeon.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
A typical PDA battery (3.7 V, 950 mAh = 3.5 Wh) would be drained after about half an hour...
From what I recall 'Geode' is what National Semiconductor kept of Cyrix after they bought it & then sold it to VIA.
'Geode' being National Semi's name for Cyrix's MediaGX line. The MediaGX being basically a Cyrix 686 with a IO/logic chipset (memory controller, PCI & ISA bus, Floppy/IDE controllers, Serial/parrallel/PS2, etc, etc), video chipset & Audio all embedded on the core.
The concept was to make it possible for venders to build really super cheap Pentium clone systems, as not much more would be needed on the motherboard but a propietry CPU socket, a RAM slot, the drive connectors, the backplane connectors & the BIOS flashchip, plus no video card or audio card would be needed either.
You see Cyrix saw this as the only way to get the economies of scale to beat Intel. As many venders were happy to pay more for Intel, they saw the only way to beat them was to provide a platform that undercut Intel so much that venders wouldn't be able to resist 'taking the Pepsi challenge'.
Now even though the Cyrix 686 had the fastest X86 integer core ever (per clock), it's floating point performance was weak & it just didn't ramp up clock wise. Of course this was more a problem of perception & marketing than reality. The vast majority of office productivity apps (circa 97) worked quite competitively on it, but clock speed was the marketing king & gamers 'n benchtests were heavily floating point biased & gamers 'n benchtests had heavy undue influence on what systems people bought.
Which gets us to Cyrix's 7G Joshua/Cayenne core. The pre-production samples had the 686 Integer core (still quite sufficient as it was still the fastest & most efficient X86 integer core per clock ever), 2 floating point cores (& each one singularly outperformed the old 686 one), 2 3DNow units, 64KB of L1 cache & 256KB of L2 cache, all running on a 133mhz bus.
Only problem was it still had the 686 issue of poor rampability. This meant that VIA (whic,h as previously mentioned, had purchased most of Cyrix from National Semi) released the pre-production samples with too overly ambitious/misleading PR-ratings, meaning they benchmarked against their competition piss-poorly, even though if they were benchmarked on the bassis of their real clock speeds they out did anything released by Intel & AMD at the same clock speed. Of course that means nothing if the oppositions ramping at much higher speeds. Which is why VIA went with the IDT Winchip II 'n III & the VIA C3.
It was this problem that killed Cyrix's super cheap Pentium clone platform based on a propietry 886 with embedded everything chip, the Cyrix MediaGX. However National Semi saw the potential of such a chip in the embedded market, which wasn't so influenced by Moores law. Yes in the embedded market a X86 chip with embedded everything can be quite useful, even if it's not ramping up at the same speed as the PC market does. So National Semi kept the MediaGX & renamed it the Geode.
What this has to do with AMD I don't know? I assume, going by this thread though, that AMD must've bought the Geode off AMD, & AMD's now basing the Geode off Athlon cores.
My question is do these new Athlon Geodes have a IO/logic chipset (memory controller, PCI & ISA bus, Floppy/IDE controllers, Serial/parrallel/PS2, etc, etc), video chipset & Audio all embedded on the core, like the Cyrix MediaGX did? Which would I assume mean a propietry form factor?
"If it meant better battery life, I could live with a processor this slow in a laptop"
;-)
Slow ? Hey you insensitive clod ! My workstation at home is a Celeron 633 !!!
I am writing this on a Sony Vaio with the AMD Athlon 1Ghz cpu, supposedly with "power-stepping" technology. Ok, if its not in use it drops down to maybe 600Mhz, but since the day I got it, (in November 2001) I have never had a battery life of more than 1 hour !
In fact, these days, I would be lucky to get 40 minutes from a full charge.
I guess I need a new battery, but as its a mobile desktop replacement, and I use it for video capture and conversion, it spends a whole lot of its life plugged in to the mains anyway.
But, a nice 1.4 Ghz machine running with lower power would definitely be better.
I am currently running the Climateprediction.net modelling software as a service, and the fan has been running constantly for around 12 hours now !
subj!
:-)
I hope those Geode's sometime will join power of Athlon64 and little power consumption of PDAs
Instead of making a genuine update on the MediaGX/Geode line by creating a Athlon with an embedded logic/IO chipset & embedded multimedia chipset, they've just given the name to a range of underclocked Athlons.
What a bloody wank.
'Geode' is what National Semiconductor kept of Cyrix after they bought it & then sold it to VIA. Geode' being National Semi's name for Cyrix's MediaGX line. The MediaGX being basically a Cyrix 686 with a IO/logic chipset (memory controller, PCI & ISA bus, Floppy/IDE controllers, Serial/parrallel/PS2, etc, etc), video chipset & Audio all embedded on the core.
The concept was to make it possible for venders to build really super cheap Pentium clone systems, as not much more would be needed on the motherboard but a propietry CPU socket, a RAM slot, the drive connectors, the backplane connectors & the BIOS flashchip, plus no video card or audio card would be needed either.
You see Cyrix saw this as the only way to get the economies of scale to beat Intel. As many venders were happy to pay more for Intel, they saw the only way to beat them was to provide a platform that undercut Intel so much that venders wouldn't be able to resist 'taking the Pepsi challenge'.
Now even though the Cyrix 686 had the fastest X86 integer core ever (per clock), it's floating point performance was weak & it just didn't ramp up clock wise. Of course this was more a problem of perception & marketing than reality. The vast majority of office productivity apps (circa 97) worked quite competitively on it, but clock speed was the marketing king & gamers 'n benchtests were heavily floating point biased & gamers 'n benchtests had heavy undue influence on what systems people bought.
Which gets us to Cyrix's G7X86 Joshua/Cayenne core. The pre-production samples had the 686 Integer core (still quite sufficient as it was still the fastest & most efficient X86 integer core per clock ever), 2 floating point cores (& each one singularly outperformed the old 686 one), 2 3DNow units, 64KB of L1 cache & 256KB of L2 cache, all running on a 133mhz bus.
Only problem was it still had the 686 issue of poor rampability. This meant that VIA (which as previously mentioned, had purchased most of Cyrix from National Semi) released the pre-production samples with too overly ambitious/misleading PR-ratings, meaning they benchmarked against their competition piss-poorly, even though if they were benchmarked on the bassis of their real clock speeds they out did anything released by Intel & AMD at the same clock speed. Of course that means nothing if the opposition's ramping at much higher speeds. Which is why VIA went with the IDT Winchip as the VIA C3.
It was this problem that killed Cyrix's super cheap Pentium clone platform based on a propietry 886 with embedded everything chip, the Cyrix MediaGX. However National Semi saw the potential of such a chip in the embedded market, which wasn't so influenced by Moores law. Yes in the embedded market a X86 chip with embedded everything can be quite useful, even if it's not ramping up at the same speed as the PC market does. So National Semi kept the MediaGX & renamed it the Geode. Going by this thread though, AMD bought Geode off National Semi some 6 months ago, & AMD's now basing the Geode off Athlon cores.
But instead of making a genuine update on the MediaGX/Geode line by creating a Athlon with an embedded logic/IO chipset (memory controller, PCI & ISA bus, Floppy/IDE controllers, Serial/parrallel/PS2, etc, etc) & embedded multimedia chipset (video & audio out), they've just given the name to a range of underclocked Athlons.
What a bloody wank.
In reality Moore's law works for low powered cool chips too.
Using Moore's law one can make chips faster 'n faster, relative to the voltage they're running at.
Meaning one can get these faster chips & underclock them, which lets them run at lower voltages & thus at less consumption.
From what I understand these low power/low heat chips are basically just their best chips underclocked
So really AMD's copping out on what the Geode's really about, which was traditionally a X86 chip with a embedded I0/logic chipset & multimedia chipset, all on the one core (X86 CPU, memory controller, PCI & ISA bus controller, Floppy/IDE controllers, Serial/parrallel/PS2, video out & audio out).
about 1GHz. My primary home machine is still a Pentium 180. It isn't any slower than it ever was.
Swapping can easily kill the framerate more than a slow videocard. Especially when a game is playable most of the time, but the framerate goes down to single digit numbers from time to time not enough ram is often the problem.
Trying to fix swapping with a faster HDD is obviously stupid, more ram is needed.
Jan
I don't know about other folks out there, but *MY* next computer is going to be a SILENT one:
.-)
No fans, possibly no moving parts at all, and with power consumption low enough that my living room and my electricity bill don't need aditional cooling either.
I've been watching the VIA EPIA based mini boards for a while, and I like what I see. If AMD wants to compete in this segment, I may buy an AMD offer again - they stil have a few more months to make up thir minds.
I'm waiting for solid-state laptops. My desktop systems use about 2.5 - 4GB of disk space, with my files on the server, but I could get some serious stuff done with an 8GB solid-state laptop, and they'd be virtually indestructible.
Maybe it would work better to have a boatload of RAM (4-8GB) caching the most-used parts of a filesystem on a very low level, so the drive only spins up when the cache can't satisfy. The RAM could also hold a shadow file for periodic writes to mass storage (be it network or spinning media). Your hard drive would only kick in for a few seconds every hour to flush it's write buffers.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Seems to me that the VIA C5J has better power (3.5W at 1GHz) and 800MHz FSB. The only advantage of Geode is the integrated peripherals. But you can get a two chip solution through VIA that has more peripherals than a Geode and better price point.
The videocard on the Geode is pretty low-end, VIA's beats it. Also the built-in cryptography accelleration on the C5J would make it useful for kiosks that would like to use encrypted media or encrypted connection and it vastly improves key exchanges and certificate signing (assuming you have software to support the feature).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Does this mean that AMD is phasing out the Cyrix MediaGX GEODE platform in favor of an Athlon/NexGen-based platform? Do they keep the Cx55x0 companion chipset or does it also go away?
Kriston
Time for a bit of karma burning...How the fuck you insensitive clods moderated that as troll??And fyi,nope the parent post did not say that...he was talking about speed which is a differnet matter rather than the one i described.You see SPEED is not HORSE POWER, or in other words PROCESSING POWER HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SPEED (at least not in the way the parent post was modded as informative).AFAIK the amount of instructions processed depends on how "fat" the instruction pipeline is. Having said that AMD designs the cpu's with fatter pipelines than the P4s, you have a LOWER CLOCKED CPU doing the WORKLOAD of a HIGHER RATED INTEL cpu. In other words "HORSEPOWER is not necessarily connected to SPEED" I havent got a clue if anyone will read this post. I dont give a fuck to be honest. BUT DEFINATELLY MY PREVIOUS POST WAS NOT A FUCKIN TROLL...
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
I find it uncomfortable to read with a flashing or animated display. Any computer that I use or set up for a friend will filter popups, banner ads, animated GIFs and Flash. Which is why I have a friend who is comfortably running Opera on a 75MHz Pentium from 1995. (RAM and HDD upgrades were performed years back using old spare parts.) With his cable modem connection it works just fine; there are not many web pages that display slower than they would on a brand new machine, since the server is the weak link in most cases. His setup works better than a new high speed connection system with IE and no popup filtering, and better than dialup which 60% of home users still use.
And of course he does also read email and do IM chat, again without trouble. I think there's something to this idea that you hardly need any processor power for basic productivity programs.
Let's boast about how old and slow our equipment is.