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

imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

A Beowulf cluster of these...

Hey, at least the power bill wouldn't kill you.

Re:imagine...

[eh2o]

It seems to me that its about high efficiency, not low power. Merely having a low power chip does not help a supercomputer if you need that many more of them to get the same performance.

PDA's

[SlongNY]

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

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.

Obviously not for Canadians

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not x86 processors

[ackthpt]

These are based upon the MIPS32 RISC processor. Remember the R4000? These are 32 bit, how about that MIPS64 ;-)

upgrade from your SGI workstation to a tablet today!

FLOPS per Watt?

[DumbSwede]

It'd be nice to see how these stack up in FLOPS per Watt.

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.

how long....

[no reason to be here]

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?

Re:how long....

[Ironsides]

Please look at the Crusoe Processor They consume under 2 watts and I believe they have broken the Ghz barrier.

From the Product Briefs linked to in the article:

[grommit]

# 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.

These are not new

[Weaselmancer]

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.

We use these (they are smokin!)

[Anonymous Coward]

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 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.