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Power-Light Power Chips
DD writes to tell us ZDNet is running a story about a new Santa Clara, CA based startup that is boasting a new line of low-power, Power chips, the same architecture found in current day Macs and IBM servers. From the article: "The company's first so-called PWRficient chip will feature two processing cores, run at 2GHz and consume on average about 5 watts, thanks to an emphasis on integration and circuit design. At a maximum, it will consume 25 watts, far less than the single-core Power chips that can hit 90 watts found on the market today."
It is amazing expecially when you consider that many current Intel chips suck down 150 watts at 2.8 GHZ. This isn't like Transmeta either. The team at PA Semi are some pretty heavy hitters in the chip design world.
Thalasar
ICs pretty much just turn electric energy into thermal energy, power computation wise.
Uses
Print rasterizers: I have printers with imaging engines capable of 30+ppm but I rarely achieve it in the real world because the printers are hobled by a measly ~500Mhz rasterizer.
Networking equipment:If you want to do any kind of complex routing or switching in a truely flexible manner without ASICS you are going to need as fast of a processor as possible.
Complex analyisis of data in an appliance:Antispam appliances are often limited in the algorithms they use because the cost in processing time for some of the better ones are too expensive to apply to the volume of messages they are supposed to handle.
etc.
While I am aware that there are large swaths of the embedded market where nothing more complex than a microcontroller is needed I am also cognizant of the fact that there are many areas where a more powerfull embedded processor which is still energy efficient is still very usefull.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
A hard drive only uses about 10W, and a typical PC only has one. IIRC, fans use about 1/3 as much power as the components they're cooling. So processors are still using a large fraction of a computer's power.
According to the Web site it has AltiVec. By 2007 I think Apple will have switched completely to Intel, never to look back.
Well except the guys at PA Semi have actually designed and shipped chips.
Here's some Bios
Dan Dobberpuhl, President and CEO
Dan Dobberpuhl, President and CEODan Dobberpuhl, who cofounded P.A. Semi in July 2003, has been credited with developing fundamental breakthroughs in the evolution of high-speed and low-power microprocessors. Prior to founding P.A. Semi, Dobberpuhl was vice president and general manager of the Broadband Processor division of Broadcom Corporation. He came to Broadcom via an acquisition of his previous company, SiByte Inc., founded in 1998, which Broadcom acquired in 2000. Before that, Dobberpuhl worked for Digital Equipment Corporation for more than 20 years, where was credited with some of the most fundamental breakthroughs in microprocessor technology. In 1998, EE Times named Dobberpuhl as one of the "40 forces to shape the future of the Semiconductor Industry." In 2003, he was awarded the prestigious IEEE Solid State Circuits Award for "Pioneering design of high-speed and low-power microprocessors."
Dobberpuhl holds 15 patents and has many publications related to integrated circuits and CPUs, including coauthorship of the seminal textbook Design and Analysis of VLSI Circuits, published by Addison-Wesley in 1985. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois.
Nah - he knows nothing about processor design - but random dude at slashdot know more.
Rest of the team's bios
BSD
Thalasar
The average 3"5 (desktop) hard drive (aka 7200RPM SATA/ATA133) runs around 7W idle and about 10W in seeking, high-perfs being a bit higher (12W seeking for 72Gb 10000RPM Raptor drive)
Notebook 2"5 5400RPM drives run around 1W idle (0.8W for a Samsung M40 MP0402H) and around 3W seeking.
The fans I can check right now all fall between 0.15 and 0.30A, 12V.
This means that running them at max tension (12V) you're looking at 1.8W to 3.6W. Undervolt them at 7V and you fall between 1 and 2W.
And these are specs for 80mm to 120mm fans
So no, hard drives and fan often ain't the worst offenders as far as power consumption goes.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
These are (theoretically, since they don't exist yet) based on the POWER architecture used by IBM big iron servers, which is related but incompatible to the PowerPC chips in Macs. Different pinouts and almost certainly no Altivec.
Perhaps if this company had existed a couple years ago, Lord Steve might have given them an audition before jumping to Intel. But even if they somehow got their current chips to mass production in industry-record time, they would still be years away from being able to ship a PowerPC version.
Of course, it's a little harder to upgrade a hardware codec, so you're locked into supporting whatever yesterday's killer format was, instead of what people want today. What you really want is some general-purpose hardware you can reconfigure without too much pain. Say a speedy processor to pump data to a DSP chip or two....
Just junk food for thought...
This article says it's 13 watts, with 25 watts at peak. A little early start on the number juggling eh?
The old POWER instruction set is dead; no one uses it any more. These days Power Architecture is PowerPC. And this new processor does have AltiVec. Pinouts are irrelevant since they were never standardized in the first place.
Many of these ASICs are in fact FPGAs. In volume, a decent sized FPGA can be bought for under $2. The contents of the chip is stored in a 2Mb flash chip, and can be re-flashed if new codecs are required. Some FPGA manufacturers even give you the design for a simple PowerPC core, so you can run a general purpose OS on part of the chip and feed data to the hardware CODECs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Because the difference between a DSP and a normal CPU is very small now-a-days.
It used to be that only DSPs had multiply and accumulate instructions - now many CPUs do (the Power being among them).
It used to be that only DSPs had the register count to do an FFT without having to spill to memory during the butterflys - the Power also has enough registers to avoid having to spill to memory in the innermost butterflys.
It used to be that only DSPs had the fast barrel shifters for single-cycle shifts of more than one bit position - now most CPUs have them.
I can go on and on - but simply put, the only real difference between a DSP and a modern CPU is that very few DSPs are clocked at 2GHz, while many CPUs are.
The really fast DSPs are the ones like the TI C6X family - which get their "speed" from being very long instruction word processors, much like the Itanium. They don't have a very high clock speed - the fastest C6x is running about 1GHz. They are benchmark queens - the will do a 4096 point FFT blindingly fast. Oh, you wanted to do something ELSE with the data after you did the FFT? Sorry, but now you are going to lose most of that speed as the code falls out of cache, and as you run out of vectorizable code and stall most of the cores. Besides, you can get just as much speed-up using the vector instructions of a modern CPU (Altivec/SSE etc.) as you do from the C6X processor.
They also suck when you are doing protocol as opposed to signal processing - DSPs *hate* jump instructions, and don't EVEN think of asking them to do a context switch - they are like a drag racer, they go fast until you ask them to TURN.
In short, the days of the DSP as the king of signal processing are past - you can do more with a general purpose processor and an FPGA than you can with DSPs for the same amount of board real-estate, bill of materials cost, and power consumption.
Sorry, but since this is actually what I do for a living, I know from first-hand experience that DSPs really aren't all they are cracked up to be with respect to regular processors now-a-days.
www.eFax.com are spammers
"But it still seems like you're replacing a rather inexpensive part ($1-$5 DSP or $3-$10 FPGA) with a God-awefully expensive CPU ($20-$50)."
/bot wanking off in his parents' basement spouting off on subjects he read about on Wikipedia. I've designed several pieces of gear, some of which have flown on the Shuttle, and which have sold many tens of millions of dollars worth of gear. I work with prototype silicon from TI, IBM, Xilinx, Altera, and other vendors.
Oh, that was FUNNNEEEEEYYYY! Tell me another one, please!
The 400 MHz version of the C6x runs about US$21 in 1K quantity.
There is no price advantage, no real performance advantage, no real board real-estate advantage, no real power advantage to DSPs. They are harder to do REAL work with than general purpose CPUs. The flat SUCK at context switching or interrupt service.
Like I said - I do this for a living - have been for over a decade. I am not just some
www.eFax.com are spammers
Indeed, it is too late for Apple right now ... just as they switch to Intel something comes out that *may* be vastly more performant per Watt and far more integrated (meaning cost savings).
W T102405055354&p=3
Anyway, for more information on the core of this new processor: http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=R
The last line is very interesting: "per core typical power at 4W and worst case at 7W"
is available on Real World Technolgies http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RW T102405055354