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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.
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.
"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
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.
Well, I think it has something to do with the fact that there are two dimensions that consumers are using to quantify merit.
A processor that emits 1000 cluons per microsecond, but dissipates as much heat as a blow-dryer might be far inferior to a processor that only emits 500 cluons per microsecond, but will run on the electricity from one key lime, depending on the users' application.
As much as consumers want to have a single "figure of merit" to make their shopping easier, it just ain't so.
Actually, this single-number-shopping has always driven me somewhat crazy about the wintel hardware fanboys -- and how the One Metric That Matters changes over time (remember when disk drive vendors proudly published the avg. seek time? Now it seems to be RPM. Next year, I assume it will be specific gravity).
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
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
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
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