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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?"
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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