AMD's New Low-Power CPUs

illumina+us writes "AMD has released a new family of CPUs targeted at the portable computing market. The new CPUs, collectively named Alchemy, consume less than 1Watt of power. The CPUs have already been named the CPU of choice for Tivo's new Tivo-To-Go technology and are powerful enugh to run DivX, WMV9, and MPEG. The AU1550 consumes just 0.5 Watts at 400 MHz and the AU1100 consumes 0.25 at the same clock speed. These processors consume so little energy they don't even need a heatsink."

Comments

PDA's

[SlongNY]

Wonder if these will pop up on PDA's and stuff soon..

Re:PDA's

[tmasssey]

Given this formfactor, I'm really suprised they didn't create a Mini-ITX format board. Then they'd have a whole slew of ready-made periphials: cases, power supplies, etc.

Re:PDA's

[yope]

I doubt they'll become very popular.
They Alchemy family is not that new actually. AFAIR they have been around for at least 2 or 3 years now, and have barely gotten some attention from the embedded developer world.

AMD has made inroads in the embedded processor bussiness before, with their Elan and embedded-K6 processors. Those have been moderately popular by those seeking x86 compatibility, since the Elan is a mocked-up 486 with chipset functionality and some periferals in one chip: Expensive, extremely power-hungry, slow and very modest on-chip periferals, but x86 compatible. They are mostly forgotten now.

The Alchemy on the other hand is based on a 32-bit MIPS core (remeber SGI? Guess where their chip developers went?). That makes the Alchemy more powerful, less power-hungry, cheaper and able to include some more amount of periferals on-chip, but they are not x86 compatible.

That leaves them pretty much out in the cold, because there are IMHO far more attractive alternatives of non-x86 embedded processors, like those based on the ARM family of cores, built by Samsung, Atmel, Philips, TI, Cirrus-Logic, Intel and many more, as well as the PowerPC based embedded processors from Motorola and IBM. Specially the Power-QUICC I and II families from Motorola cover an impressive price and performance range, offer modest to very high processing power, and unprecedented flexibility due to their second integrated RISC based communications processor and programmable bus controller.
Those are the two most popular embedded processor platforms around these days. If you need power-efficiency, there's no better than ARM. If you need high computing performance or high-bandwith data processing, go for PowerPC. AMD's Alchemy is somewhere in the middle, but until now they only cover a narrow range of applications.

How fast are they really?

[jandrese]

The writeup says you can run DivX, etc... but they don't say at what resolution or framerate. I've got PXA-255 based PDAs that can run DivX/WMV...as long as it is no larger than a postage stamp and encoded at more than 15 fps. The processor is still dog slow at stuff like compiling though. The writeup nor the articles give a good impression of exactly how fast these guys are, and that's a little worrysome. I don't mind energy efficent processors, but the last thing I want is something underpowered in my media center (oh, it can't handle 640x480 DivX, yay!).

Mini-ITX replacement...

[B5_geek]

While I love the size and versatile nature of Via's Mini-ITX line, I have found their systems to be very unreliable.

These AMD systems would be perfect for many linux applications;

firewall, file servers, dumb-terminals, HTPC boxes, hell make a cluster out of 100 of them and they still waste less energy then a P4!

It would be cool to see how a cluster like that could handle mpeg4 encoding/decoding.

You also have CarPC's and many other options.
I want some, can ya tell?

transmeta

[Anonymouse Cownerd]

dare i say it? this makes transmeta all the more irrelevant. once a cool company with innovative technology, now they are no more than third place runner-up in the processor company race, and falling behind fast.

Re:FLOPS per Watt?

[ivan256]

Probably zero.

There's no evidence there that the MIPS32 core they used implements the (optional) floating point instructions. Of course you have to sign up for details so I can't say for sure...

Since the video capabilities are handled by an accessory processing unit, and since they were trying to cut power consumption, I'd be surprised if there was an FPU in the general purpose core.

AMD mucking around in other fields

[oboylet]

I'm always pleasantly surprised with what AMD cooks up in addition to their x86 business.

AMD is a much more interesting company that we geeks often realize. Too often we think, AMD=Athlon/Opteron, but I find their gadgety endeavors really interesting.

Apple's Airport (and maybe extreme/express, dunno) has a tiny AMD processor , and as the parent points out, now their playing with MIPS archs. A friend of mine worked at the fab in Dresden and said that a third of their operations had to do with flash.

Call me a fanboy, but I sure do like the AMD kool aid. They make neato products and deserve mucho respect.

Re:Obviously not for Canadians

[DrEldarion]

I live near Chicago, and my room used to be the coldest in the house. During the winter, frost would form on the walls.

Then I got an Athlon-650 computer in there and a 19" CRT monitor, and from then on, it was the warmest room in the house, even in the winter.

AMD's Geode

[dfj225]

Also of interest would be AMD's Geode line of processors, found here: http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/Pro ductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863,00.html. It looks like these guys run on about 1 Watt and are x86 compatible.

Re:imagine...

[Max Romantschuk]

Actually low power chips are gaining popularity in super computer environments. A major cost of operating a huge cluster is power and getting rid of all the heat.

Low power chips are therefore much cheaper to operate, and can be packed more densely as they require less cooling. The future of computing lies in massively distributed low power solutions, it simply makes much more sense than the alternatives.

ex DECcies strike again

[Pemdas]

This comes out of AMD's aquisition of Rich Witek's startup (named Alchemy). Rich Witek was one of the original guys working on the Alpha chip (among other projects). Alchemy originally targetted PDA's with their low power MIPS32 processors and on-chip peripheral support.

Interestingly, Dan Dobberpuhl, another Digital alumnus who was influential in the Alpha project, also founded his own company to make MIPS based processers, though for a slightly different target market. That company was SiByte, and was acquired by Broadcom in 2000 or 2001. He has since moved on to start PASemi, which seems to be in the same general business.

Digital may be gone, but it's engineers are still making waves!