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.

Comments

are the power numbers correct?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

We're fast enough...

[LostCluster]

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.

These would make great home server processors

[Sivar]

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.

Via C3 anyone

[IceFox]

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