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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."
A Beowulf cluster of these...
Hey, at least the power bill wouldn't kill you.
Wonder if these will pop up on PDA's and stuff soon..
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These new chips are obviously not aimed at the Canadian market, or any market that has severe winters. We use our computers to heat buildings, fry eggs and cook bacon.
And when there's no electricity, we burn them for heat.
upgrade from your SGI workstation to a tablet today!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Perhaps these are the chips Supercomputer manufactures should be building machines with. Sounds to be low in cost to build AND low in cost to run.
Letter To Iran
until we can get that kind of low power consumption on desktop chips? is there something inherent in desktop applications that prevent some chip maker from making a really low-power, high-performance (~1GHz) processor?
my pet machine
These processors are new but the Alchemy name is not. AMD has been selling alchemy processors for at least a year.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
# Support for MPEG1, 2, 4, and WMV9 scaled up to 1024x768
# MPEG2 main profile/main level (720x480, 10Mbps, 30fps)
# MPEG4 advanced simple profile/level 5 (720x480, 8Mbps, 30fps)
# WMV9 main profile/medium level (720x480, 2Mbps, 30fps)
Doesn't look too bad to me. This was for the Au1200 btw.
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.
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
I've had an Alchemy Au1100 devboard on my desk for over a year. The disk that came with the devboard is dated 1-27-2003.
There is already a very complete Linux port mostly done by Montavista.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Realistically, it doesn't matter much that they aren't x86. To me at least. I'm sure Linux will be running on it in no time.
Besides, they're aiming for the PDA market, which doesn't have x86 compatibilty as it stands anyhow.
I wonder if this technology will be adapted to the PC market in any way, shape or form. With such low power consumption, they are a fanless CPU, and a fanless power supply would probably be feasible I imagine. True silent computing sounds good to me... or is that doesn't sound...?
In any case, it is very cool tech, literally, and figuratively speaking.
I'm too lazy to enter a sig. Hey wait a second! You tricked me!
Two words:
NO HEATSINK.
If you can get a video board that works with only a passive heatsink, and then run this thing with a minimal heatsink, you lower your heat problems.
Lower them enough, and you can get a smaller fan to cool the entire unit, or even get away without a fan entirely (though given how long a TIVO has to stay turned on, it's likely you need some minimal level of guaranteed airflow to avoid overheating the unit the same way you used to be able to overheat an NES).
But the smaller, and fewer, fans you have to put into it, the quieter it is. And living-room appliances want to be as quiet as possible, to avoid interfering with the quiet moments inside of a game/movie/TV show.
We have ported eCos RTOS to Au1x00 and have used Alchemy CPUs in two embedded products. They have outstanding performance, good GNU tool support, and easy-to-understand MIPS risc goodness.
One thing to watch for: The onboard peripherals are geared more to PDAs (no real watchdog, limited-feature timers, etc). You would want to check your embedded application requirements. On the plus side, the JTAG TAP makes board support and debugging a snap.
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.
Can't wait for ThermalTake to make a Copper Brick heatsink for this bad boy. I'll break the 2Ghz barrier with this. So what if my PDA weighs 15lbs, can yours run AutoCad?
If you think
They aren't. However, AMD does have a line of x86 embedded processors known as Geode. For example, I see here a 400Mhz Geode consumes 1.1 watts of power. This is part of their more general x86 everywhere plan...with x86 chips as cheap as $1.
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!
Generally, the relationship between compute power and power consumption for a single chip is super-linear. So, for well-parallelizable problems, using more chips that are individually less powerful helps you with overall power consumption.