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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.
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.
It seems as if there has been a lack of proofreading for stories lately.
ex: "AMD doesn't see much a market for that"
Intel phrases Itanium into a complicated metaphor.
Unknown host pong.
"If they use less energy, does that also mean that these processors will give off less heat?"
I'll let you ponder that one for awhile.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Ouch!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I'd say that AMD's naming scheme is based on something a bit more mind-altering than speed too...
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
AMD's scoring isn't based on MHz, but speed.
Which is contradictory to most people's belief that AMD's scoring is based on too much acid.
The reason is that people really do think that MHz matters. I heard the procurement manager explain tot he CIO a few days ago that "The 2.4GHz celeron is the same SPEED as the 2.4GHz Pentium 4, and it's almost twice as fast as the 1.2GHz Macs that we could buy, so we should buy the celerons."
I had to stop myself from busting some faces at his comment for political reasons, but I DID do a demonstration for the dean of students of a 500MHz Mac G4 kicking a 1.4GHz Dell's ass in start time, digitizing media, compression, and browsing speed.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
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