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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."
As if millions of Apple customers suddenly cried out, and were silenced.
What a relief. Implement this en masse and a dormitory full of idling computers running aim won't use as much energy as a small country anymore.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
From the article:
"The PWRficient actually won't come out for two years, so it's hard to predict exactly how it will stack up against the competition."
In two years a 2 GHZ dual core will probably be a good option for a high-end embedded CPU.
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.
1) design a low-power-consumption high-performance PowerPC chip that would be ideal for Apple to use
2) keep the development so secret that spouses are kept in the dark
3) launch the product after Apple has already abandoned PowerPC
4) ???
5) PROFIT!
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.
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