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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.
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.
We're talking about laptops here, not workstations. Most laptop use is running presentations, reading email and writing documents. For that, a 500Mhz P3 or so is fine. Yes, if you want to demonstrate a new numerical solver you may want a faster machine, but otherwise the disadvantages outweigh the benefits.
I don't understand the drive for such powerful laptops for non-specialist use these days. A 5kg doorstop with a short battery life that runs so hot it needs a fan on while idle and burns your hands doesn't seem my ideal portable computing platform.
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.
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