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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.
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...
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?
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.
....'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.
Basically, we're left with model numbers now. The numbers slapped on by marketing will now have nothing to do with the actual content of the chip by any known benchmark.
You see, there's this thing called Google... National Semi sells unit to AMD.
Why are all the "eco-friendly" processors only released for notebooks. How about releasing a nice low power chip for the desktop?
There isn't much sense in bossting MegaHertz numbers anyway, as long as technologies like IDE, PCI and SD-RAM are around. It's like putting an airplane engine into a Ford Fiesta.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
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.
Thats the first thought I had too, but cache misses and other things can eat away at linearity. AMD has been pretty good at assigning model numbers that accurately reflect the real world performance of the chip compared to intel, so something like that must be going on.
Yep, dead on. I had a friend who was agonizing over the choice between 2.2 and 2.5 GHz processors; when I asked him what he planned to do with the machine, he told me it was for web surfing and light bookkeeping. But he wouldn't believe that a reconditioned 500 MHz PII box would do those just fine.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
If you talk to enough laptop owners who would build their own desktop computers, you'll hear more complaints about a laptop sluggish HDD transfer speed than the CPU speed. For many of the laptops I've come across (and most mainstream store-bought boxes) is that the Harddrive and/or I/O controller is the bottleneck that makes the computer feel slower.
I'd rather see advancements in laptop I/O and memory access than faster CPUs. Most of the mid to high range laptops on the market today have plenty CPU power to run presentations and and with decent decidated video chipset, FPS games. HDD access is what kills faster framerates IMO.
$cat
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
Not entirely sure why you are ranting about high end desktop/notebook CPU's in a thread about embedded CPU's. These CPU's ARE focused on lower power consumption, fanless operation (cooler) and lower price point.
These CPU's are targeted at set top boxes in particular so they may need either enough CPU horsepower or a coprocessor to process digital video. That's not so demanding at NTSC/PAL resolutions but it is fairly demanding for HDTV.
If you get down to the old National Geode line which is the bottom of this new produce line up they are dirt cheap in quantity, very low power and don't have a lot of horsepower.
@de_machina
Same here. But the problem is then people write thier apps for that more computing power, and it just seems to get wasted.
Most current-day coders don't seem understand the word optimize very well.
And I'm not talking in-lining assembly, or using C vs. an interpreted language, I'm talking about really stupid algorithms that are slow in any language.
Forgot to comment on your last point. This product line isn't being marketed to consumers. Its being marketed to EE's who are balancing horsepower, cost, heat and power consumption to get the best fit for the appliance they are building.
The consumer probably wont even know what CPU is inside the box they are getting from their cable company or are buying from the electronics department in a department store.
@de_machina
You've got to remember that AMD might look at their profit margins on these 'embedded' processors and their normal laptop ones and decide for the simple reason of wanting a profit, that it makes more sense to push a 2.5GHz laptop power-hungry processor than their cheaper, power-sipping ones. And if a market grows quickly for small, power-sensitive processors in laptops (say, Transmetta or VIA start making major headway), then *wow* AMD's got a processor that can compete as soon as they can change their marketing material...
But the real issue is where power goes in laptops. You've got HDDs, screens which need to be "big and bright" these days (even say, 5-6" screen with a good backlight is power hungry), graphics processors, optical drives, etc.
I know someone will say "well, I don't need an optical drive or a graphics processor..." but, well, lots of people do for a laptop, and although you might not need a graphics processor that's powerhungry... remember when you compare a 1.4GHz embedded processor without a graphics processor, don't expect it to come close in performance to a PC in the similar speed range on *any* real applications.
But yeah, i think that AMD not seeing the market might be because of voluntary blindness because seeing this market means eating into other markets.
Tim
Yes, but a 1GHz AthlonXP-M chip (basically what these Geode NX chips are) will run circles around an Efficeon running at 1GHz. The 1GHz Efficeon will typically give you performance in the same sort of range of a 500MHz AthlonXP.
Ohh, and the Transmeta chips are more expensive to boot.