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."

Comments

This vs ARM Cortex A8?

[Sam Haine '95]

I wonder how this will compare to the ARM Cortex A8 in 2007?

Re:Embedded market

[wowbagger]

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.