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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...
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"
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?
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
Intel phrases Itanium into a complicated metaphor.
Unknown host pong.
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.
Yes, in August 2003. AMD has decided to include all of its low-power x86 processors in the "Geode" brand.
My server
You see, there's this thing called Google... National Semi sells unit to AMD.
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.
"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. -
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
All the power "used" in a CPU is turned into heat. So yes, these Geodes give off less heat (hence the lack of a fan in Geode NX cooling solutions).
My server
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.
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.
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.
Ouch!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
These Geodes are actually Mobile Athlon XP processors tweaked to run at low speeds and low power. I.e., they will spank the pants off of an old school Geode both in terms of Instructions per Clock and clock rate. It would be like putting a mouse up against a 3 headed fire breathing dragon in battle.
Of course, the Athlon based Geodes are using 5x the power of the old Geode, etc.
I think that AMD has just bought out the Geode name and is repositioning it slowly against the Pentium-M and Centrino now, and ignoring the markets that Geode used to sell in.
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
"I think there is a market for 5 computers in the whole world." (1943)
Thomas Watson, President from IBM
According to Motorola, the 7457 running at 1GHz dissipates less than 10 watts (8.3 typical, 11.5 max). By contrast, your 400Mhz powerbook dissipates 3.29 watts typical, 7.43 max. Of course Apple runs their 7457 chips at 1.33 and 1.5GHz, because speed seems to sell more than battery life.
If you bought a newer battery for your powerbook, you would see it last a very long time -- they upped the wattage of the titanium powerbook batteries with each rev., and it got fairly high at the last rev compared to the first one (original ones were 50 watts, the last rev of the pbg4 batteries were around 65 watts).
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
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?
Well, I'll answer you second question first because it's a quick and easy: Yes. Less power consumption == less heat. Your processor is not giving off any energy as noise and (hopefully) it's not glowing so it's not giving off any light energy. There might be a TINY fraction of energy given off as a signal on the bus, but for all practical purposes *ALL* energy consumed has to be given off as heat.
Now, to get back to the first question, the AthlonXP-M is available with power consumption of 25W, 45W or 62W TDP (Thermal Design Power), depending on the model you get.
These new products are rated at 9W TDP for the "1500@6W" model and somewhat higher for the 1750@14W model (the wattage listed in the chips model number is a "typical" wattage, while TDP is the maximum, hence the disparity in numbers).
Otherwise the processors are basically the same as the AthlonXP-M chips. Basically these are just "Low Voltage" and "Ultra-Low Voltage" versions of the AthlonXP-M chips, to use Intel's name for things. They are very directly competing with Intel's ULV Pentium-M chips that run at 1.0GHz and have a TDP of 7W. Performance and power consumption should be about the same, though the AMD chips sell for about 1/3 to 1/4 the price of what the Intel chips sell for.
As compared to desktop chips they consume quite a bit less power. Power consumption isn't quite such a big deal for desktop chips, so the numbers aren't pushed as much, but generally you're looking at 50-100W or more for a top-end desktop chip. AMD's AthlonXP 3200+ processor is rated for 76.8W.
Note that the definition of TDP (Thermal Design Power) varies from one chip to another. AMD defines the TDP of their desktop AthlonXP chips as the maximum power it will consume while running an absolute worst-case bit of code. They define their TDP for their mobile AthlonXP-M, mobile and desktop Athlon64 and workstation/server Opteron chips as being the maximum power consumption for any chip in that line (eg all of the "Low Power" AthlonXP-M chips are rated for 25W, regardless of clock speed, and all the "Mainstream" AthlonXP-M chips are rated for 45W, even though there is some overlap in clock speeds between the two lines).
Intel's TDP is defined slightly differently again. The Pentium-M and Celeron-M is defined much like AMD's desktop AthlonXP chips, ie absolute maximum power the chip can consume. The Mobile Pentium4-M is defined like AMD's mobile chips and their Athlon64/Opteron line, ie maximum for the line of processors. And then there's Intel's desktop P4 chips, which use a TDP that is kinda-sorta-almost the maximum power the chip will consume.
Ohh, and it just goes downhill from there. Don't even bother trying to figure out how Transmeta calculates the power consumption of their chips, because as best as I can tell they are just pulling numbers from a hat! Maybe there more info if you sign a bunch of NDAs as a developer, but from what I've seen on their website the actual power consumption of Crusoe and Efficeon chips seems to be firmly in the hands of the marketing department, not the actual specs.
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.
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