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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."
I wonder if it will run cooler. TFA doesn't say.
So are they going to be regretting moving away from that? I mean, that would have an appeal in a low to middle end laptop that can run for 12 hours or something. I'd certainly pay for it. I'm impressed with my iBook battery as it is, but it is just shy of being able to cover all my needs in a day. Or at least, usually have to think about charging it. An 8 hour laptop would be great for people on the move, like students, or amateur filmmakers.
How much power do processors use relative to the rest of the computer? It seems that hard drives and fans would use the majority of power (not to mention monitors and speakers if present).
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
I wonder how this will compare to the ARM Cortex A8 in 2007?
The big question is will it have a vector processor? If so, it could end up in an Apple design, if for no other reason, to keep the pressure on Intel. If not, this is simply another PowerPC embedded CPU...
Actually, YES, the embedded market that needs 2GHz chips - folks like me doing signal processing for communications, among other things. Do you have any idea how many operations per second it takes to do an echo canceler for a phone, or to do GSM or CDMA decoding in software (if you want a system that can adapt to new protocols - a software defined radio or SDR - you need to use a more general purpose part than the dedicated ICs for this), or to do the latest 802.11 protocols, or to do video decompression, or ....
Yes, Virginia, there is a market for 2GHz processors in the embedded space.
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I've been using a laptop in some fashion for the past 5 years. Honestly to me power and peformance are significantly more important than battery life. While I may stand alone or even stand with a small crowd of like minded people, I believe that current battery life is sufficient. Honestly I can't imagine sitting anywhere for more then 2 hours (roughly my Inspiron 9300's battery life) and if I did find myself in that situation I'd just power down, pop in my spare battery and go about my business for another two hours.
What I believe is important and newsworthy is the introduction of Dual-Core Laptops and Dual-Dual-Core Laptops which may not get 2-3 hours battery life, but can be used by power users to get close to desktop performance out of their laptop. When I'm onsite at a clients and need to run John the Ripper or encrypt/decrypt some folders in Windows, I really really wish my notebook had more raw processing power.
I just designed a complete computer that uses less than 3 watts! (more details)
Admittedly, it probably does far less than a power based computer. It runs at 1 MIPS, has only 64 bytes of RAM and spends most of its time sleeping, but on the plus side, it costs less than $10 to build and while sleeping uses about .05 watts of power.
Imagine a beowolf cluster of these babies!
Didn't Apple dump the PowerPC line because its power demand projections in upcoming generations meant more heat (less efficiency) than the Intel x86 competition? Why not just use these chips? Will we actually see a cross-platform Mac strategy, with Apple playing Intel(/AMD) against PPC makers like this, with the same MacOS running on either? Will Apple actually pull off delivering a simple interface for installing software from source, with consistent builds/runs across both Mac platforms? Who knows what to believe anymore?
--
make install -not war
will feature... will consume 25 watts
versus
far less than the single-core Power chips... on the market today
You be the judge.
You mean like IBM? Since the POWER3 (I think, maybe the POWER4) they have used POWER and PowerPC more as marketing terms (POWER means expensive, PowerPC means cheap) than as an indication of instruction set. The current POWER4/5 chips use the PowerPC instruction set. AIX on these systems will trap the few POWER instructions that are not part of PowerPC and emulate them.
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It actually reminds me of two SiliconGraphics Indigo2s (the teal ones) that we had at work. One had the the 2D graphics accelerator, and the other had the low-end 3D accelerator.
While the one with the 3D acceleration was super-fast for wireframe work, rendering any 3D graphics with a fill was noticeably faster on the computer with the 2D card. The problem was that there was no 2D acceleration on the 3D card. Any speedup you gained on the 3D coordinate transforms was more than lost when the time came to draw all those pixels.
This reminds me about a story of an engineer, a toaster, a king and a computer 'scientist'.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer , answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist , immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes." "The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
BUT... BUT..!!!