Via Unveils 1-Watt x86 CPU

DeviceGuru writes "Taiwanese chip and board vendor Via Technologies has introduced a new ultra-low voltage (ULV) processor aimed at industrial, commercial, and ultra-mobile applications. Touted as the world's most power-efficient x86-compatible CPU, the 500MHz 'Eden ULV 500' processor debuted at an Embedded Systems Conference in Taipei this week. Via says its chip draws a minimum of 0.1 Watts, when idle, and a maximum of 1 Watt, making it a great candidate for consumer electronics devices such as UMPCs, PVRs, and such."

Comments

laptop anyone

[IceFox]

A nice laptop cpu if I ever saw one.

Re:laptop anyone

[cnettel]

Yes and no. If we're going to have a backlit screen anyway (even with LEDs), we can only gain so much by reducing the CPU consumption. Amdahl's law and all that. I think the summary is quite right in pointing out UMPCs and similar devices instead.

A really low-power Dothan or single-core Yonah will sure draw a few multiples of this beast, but they will do so while giving much better performance.

Re:laptop anyone

[montyzooooma]

hmmm.. but of course we all know a "better" use of such devices, like in a "quiet, secluded" place...
Sudoku?

Re:laptop anyone

[imbaczek]

access the cvs on the road That's a novel, higher form of masochism. BDSM people will love you for the idea and VIA for making it possible.

Re:laptop anyone

[arivanov]

Not really.

I have used every single Via CPU from the original Eden 533 up to 1.5GHz C7 and IMO the C3-C5 spec Edens are just about useful for a dedicated appliances, small firewalls, small specialised servers and such. They do not have enough grunt for a laptop. The fact that most of them have are shipped bundled with relatively weak video does not really help either. Even the mpeg support on some motherboards cannot really help. Xterm is probably the most you can do with them as far as clients are concerned. Still better than similarly clocked Crusoe though (now that is a drag of all drags).

C7 is a completely different beast. This is probably the best CPU for a corporate laptop out there at the moment. A laptop is worthless without a "link to the mothership". Intel Core and AMD have to use CPU resource to do all of the encryption and decryption. This may amount to 30-40% of your CPU on a 54G wireless lan. Compared to that Via C7 has hardware AES acceleration so you can actually protect your traffic properly while using less than 1% of your CPU. It also has enough grunt to run most common road warrior apps at acceptable speeds. It is a pity it is not available as a laptop choice anywhere outside the far east.

Re:laptop anyone

[arivanov]

Why not. If you are running an Intel Centrino or Core laptop you most likely having less most of the time.

Centrino as well as any Core derived notebook under Winhoze uses voltage and frequency scaling. It will ramp up to its spec-ed frequency only when pushed really hard and in some laptops only when on AC power. If you want to actually have reasonable battery performance on Linux you end up doing the same using the cpufreq susbsystem. Example from a Core Duo on which I am typing this post:

model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T5600 @ 1.83GHz
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 229.167

Note the actual CPU frequency above (this is using ondemand kernel governor). It is more than twice less than 500.

Re:laptop anyone

[Ed Avis]

Hardware AES? Can OpenSSH use it?

Re:laptop anyone

[RAMMS EIN]

``The next question is, of course, (1) is there any power-efficient hard disk, and (2) is there any way to make sure the disk will not be spinned up more then once a few hours.''

(1) Yes. Take a look at 2.5" drives used in laptops, for example. You could also use flash instead of an actual disk. Having done that myself, I must give you a word of warning: don't do flash+usb on Linux. It will hang because of I/O errors every few days. I believe this is due to there being a hardcoded limit on the number of writes somewhere in the Linux drivers involved in this, but it could also be the flaky hardware (VIA SP8000E, never buy that one).

(2) Yes. Run off a ramdisk, and just write changes to your real disk every few hours. Puppy Linux does something like this.

Another thing you will want to look at are efficient power supplies (particularly, ones that are efficient at the low power draw of your machine).

Finally, this being about VIA, you will have to be careful with enabling CPU frequency scaling. The board I have is known to crash when the frequency is changed too often.

Re:laptop anyone

[pla]

Yes and no. If we're going to have a backlit screen anyway (even with LEDs), we can only gain so much by reducing the CPU consumption.

For a user-oriented workstation, true. Even with the Via C7, a single HDD (at spin-up, anyway) could consume more than the CPU.

I think, though, these things mostly don't go into actual desktop machines. They go into car audio solutions (with a 4x20 non-backlit LCD or even VFD), or routers (headless and with CF or USB storage) or various low-demand servers (also headless).



But for use in a laptop, yes, a backlit LCD would dwarf this CPU for power consumption. But then, in a laptop, ever watt matters - If this CPU only cuts the total load by 10%, that means 10% more runtime on a given battery, or the same runtime with a smaller and lighter battery.

Also, consider that low-power system designers typically pick the lowest fruit first... If we have a 1W CPU, solid-state primary storage, that leaves the LCD as the worst offender. How long will it take them to find ways to improve that? Whether making better use of ambient light (I've never understood why laptop screens don't have a clear/frosted back anyway, giving you the option of turning off the backlight), or using active OLED pixels that don't require an external light source, or something else entirely new and different.

I, for one, look forward to a moderately powerful portable PC that can run for over a day on a pair of AA batteries.

Re:laptop anyone

[arivanov]

By what I recall - no, but I have not looked at the OpenSSH latest and greatest (it has been 6+ months since I looked at this).

The reason is that at least as of the versions present in major distros openssh does not for some reason support openssl engines. AES (and RSA in latest Via CPUs) is done using an openssl engine which has to be initialised and loaded. This can be done for OpenVPN, Apache, Pound and nearly any other piece of software using OpenSSL, but not OpenSSH. For some reason Theo's people in their infinite wisdom left that part out (it is trivial). There was a patch, dunno if it has made it into the main tree.

As far as non-OpenSSL software is concerned, the kernel itself can use the hardware AES for filesystems and IPSEC. I have run it for quite a while for both OpenVPN and IPSEC. It can run around a Dual Xeon in circles. I would expect it to have the same killer performance for encryption of filesystems and encrypted backups as well. In fact this is possibly the only CPU on the market at the moment where having all of your data encrypted is a realistic proposition. The rest will choke on it and crawl like a 486.

There is also further improvement from having true on-CPU hardware RNG which all programs in need of good random numbers can use as it is implemented at kernel level.

Probably the highest praise to it is the fact that most of these features have now started showing up on Intel roadmap documents for the future x86 CPUs destined for the embedded market. It is the Athlon history repeating. When someone else is doing something right Intel copies it, claims innovation and launches a marketing salvo trying to lie that "they have been doing it all along".

How does it compare?

[Ed Avis]

How does this chip compare in performance per watt against ARM, PowerPC and the like?

The article doesn't say what socket and interface the chip uses. Are they still on Socket 370?

Re:How does it compare?

[pslam]

How does this chip compare in performance per watt against ARM, PowerPC and the like?

Pathetically badly. Most modern low power ARM variants are in the range 0.3-0.5mW/MHz. At 500MHz you'd see them chewing up about 150-250mW. Last I checked the Via x86 chips were single issue, so it's not too unfair to compare an ARM11 (or similar) against them. Quite frankly an ARM11 will outperform the Via chip and run lower power.

The idle power figure is a joke. I can't recall the last time I used an ARM chip that idled at 100mW. More like 1-10mW. Still, it's nice to see an x86 chip get into sub-watt territory.

Of course, ARM doesn't run native x86... and that's pretty much the only reason there's such a large market for these Via x86 chips. It's also the reason you never see them in deeply embedded systems where people don't really care so much about what ISA you're running.

Re:How does it compare?

[dan the person]

I think the popularity is half x86 compatibility(windows users) and half retail cost / availability.

When i was building a linux based PVR, x86 compatibilty was not a deciding factor *. What i wanted was a cheap fanless board that could playback mpeg2 and divx, with a PCI slot for a tuner card, TV-Out, and SATA.

When i was looking there were hundreds of Via C3/C7 based boards from heaps of manufactures, with countless different options. There were one or two ARM and PPC boards, even one with a transmetta CPU, but they didn't have TV-Out, or they had TV-Out but no USB or PCI.

I would have loved to go with another architecture but the market for retail consumers just isn't there.

* Actually, now i've said that i imagine compatibilty of the tuner drivers with non-x86 could be an issue.

Re:How does it compare?

[dreamchaser]

Wow, flashback to the 90's. There is really no such thing as RISC or CISC anymore. Even massive general purpose CPU's like the x86 family use cores that are basically RISC by the classical definition, at least at the microop level. Conversely, today's RISC processors have instruction sets that have grown considerably in complexity since the days of true RISC chips.

Your premise is correct that it is an apples to oranges comparison, but not really for the reasons you describe.

Re:How does it compare?

[Christian Smith]

There is really no such thing as RISC or CISC anymore. Even massive general purpose CPU's like the x86 family use cores that are basically RISC by the classical definition, at least at the microop level. Conversely, today's RISC processors have instruction sets that have grown considerably in complexity since the days of true RISC chips.

RISC is an instruction set thing, with the caveat that RISC instruction sets lend themselves to pipelined instruction execution as a by product.

Yes, modern x86 processors have RISC like microcode implemented using pipelined cores, but the x86 -> microcode converter is extra logic RISC processors just don't need.

There is no way you can implement an x86 chip in the same number of transistors as a RISC chip like ARM or MIPS, hence this VIA chip having considerably more power draw.

Re:How does it compare?

[lazy_playboy]

Eh? Google seems to suggest plenty of Via CPUs are available in socket form.
(Score:4, Wrong)

Re:How does it compare?

[jimstapleton]

comparing two chips on their power:mhz ratios... Not exactly a good comparison, even within the same general architecture (say both are x86), but when you go cross arch, it gets worse.

Ex. Take an Barton core Athlon and compare it with a 1st Gen P4, running both at the same clock speed. That Barton will significantly outperform the P4, even with the same Mhz. Conversely, thake a Core2 Duo and an Athlon64 X2 of the same clock speed - the Core2 Duo will wipe the floor with the Athlon64 X2.

Mhz only means something when the processors are of the same line. Different lines in an arch can drastically modify the CPUs relative performance by Mhz, varying app to app, and changing the arch completely will destroy most comparisons.

Another example, would be to compare a 500Mhz EV6 Alpha to a 1Ghz Athlon - There are many tasks at which that Alpha will pretty much destroy the Athlon in terms of performance, even at half the clock speed.

So, what you want is power:performance-at-desired-tasks ratios, it's more complex, but it's not useless (and in some cases, counterproductive/counter intuitive)

Re:How does it compare?

[pslam]

I am very much aware that comparing power:mhz is often an incredibly bad thing to do, but I am also very much aware of the internal architecture of these two cores.

• Via is single issue like ARM11. (At least, last I checked, but maybe they've changed that)
• ARM1176 (a common variant) has hit-under-miss caches, some SIMD extensions (slow compared to Via, though), and a decent FPU (optional). No write order dependency issues on ARM. Very comparable to Via.
• ARM11 has much lower memory latency than Via. It only takes 3 clocks to drag something out of memory while execution continues, you get write-to-read forwarding and a lot more registers which means less memory hits overall anyway.
• The bus speeds of both are comparable. External memory is implementation dependent, but can also be matched.

So they're actually pretty similar in a lot of ways. I guess I should restrict my usage of "better" to the usual target market: ARM11 is a better core at being a web browser or general multimedia device. It'll do the same job at lower power. In addition, you could run an ARM11 comfortably past 600MHz without a fan or even a heatsink. If you felt like splashing out, you could get a 4 core variant that would cream pretty much anything Via offers. Obviously 4 times the peak power, but still the amazing idle power consumption most ARMs give you.

Again, x86 is still the obvious choice in the market due to a SOFTWARE problem. I say "problem", but what I really mean is the unwillingness of vendors to write portable code and realise that recompiling for multiple platforms stopped being a major headache about 10 years ago.

It's pretty sad that an ISA is still a barrier to this kind of thing. There is a major example in the volume market where this did work out, though: Apple switching to x86. Hell, they even had to switch endian and everything worked. If anyone ever tells you that switching ISA is prohibitive, go point them at Apple, because it worked out damn well for them, and you can always use Apple as some kind of Godwin's Law because nobody will ever argue they're wrong.

Re:How does it compare?

[letxa2000]

Why would you require a certain clock speed?

In true embedded applications (which are built with microcontrollers, not processors), it's usually critical for establishing baud rates. A certain clock speed also may be necessary if you use a single clock source to drive multiple parts on the board which can reduce electrical noise caused by multiple clocks flailing aroumd.

Apart from that, there is no reason to prefer a 100MHz part to a 50MHz one that can do twice as much work per clock cycle.

I agree. That's why I agreed that MIPS vs MIPS and watts vs. watts is a better comparison. I simply pointed out that in real embedded work, clock speeds are often a design criteria. You still look for the best MIPS and power consumption you can get, but constraints on the clock speeds often reduce the field of viable options even if another part might have better MIPS or better power consumption but doesn't meet your clock speed requirements.

Re:Obligatory

[ookabooka]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these....

So like. . an intel 2 duo that takes a room and miles of cable?

holy cow! and their 1.5GHz is only 7.5W

[spagetti_code]

My mythtv PVR uses the MII12000 (1.2GHz), which is rated at
20-30W. With HDD, DVD, encoder card etc, it draws 80W on start,
and somewhere between 30-60W when running.

Take 10-20W off my figures by using their 1.5GHz ULV
and you get potentially more processing power at less
than 50W!

I know that VIA chips are pretty feeble (i.e. their 1.5GHz
chip is probably closer to a 1GHz intel chip), but with an
encoder card (dual actually) I can be recording two
channels with the CPU at 10%. Given their mobos have
mpeg decoders on board, I can add watching a DVD or TV
for another 30-40% CPU time.

The only thing is ad-skipping and re-encoding are pretty
slow.

Re:holy cow! and their 1.5GHz is only 7.5W

[Professor_UNIX]

Also forget the mpeg-decoder onboard. Chances are their drivers don't even support their very own chip.

Stop spreading bullshit FUD. The MPEG2 decoder hardware has been supported for years now in open source. My MythTV frontend, a Via EPIA M10000 running at 1 GHz uses the MPEG2 decoding hardware when playing back video saved from my backend's Hauppauge PVR 250 hardware mpeg2 encoders just fine with very little CPU usage. The only problems arise when you try playing DivX or MPEG4 streams.

Re:holy cow! and their 1.5GHz is only 7.5W

[tknd]

The VIA epia platforms like the one you have weren't that great. I had their 600mhz chip and ITX board and on the meter it was still drawing about 40 watts idle at the plug. The power supply probably wasn't the greatest but still I had higher hopes. That was only the ITX board plus a normal 3.5" 7200rpm hard drive. The cpu was barely enough for most tasks and some tasks you didn't even want to do. It is probably much better with your cpu but you're still drawing more power than necessary.

As a comparison, I built an Athlon64 power efficient system with normal PC parts (no laptop parts, including the CPU). I clocked down the cpu to 1ghz and with a radeon 7500 video card plus a standard 3.5" 7200 rpm hard disk and a atheros 802.11g pci card, I was able to get it to draw about 46 watts at the plug idle. During boot and while it loaded the OS, the power draw was around 60watts to 80watts. Even with only 1ghz, the athlon box could do a whole lot more than the epia. Replacing the video card with something more useful like a geforce 6200 bumped the idle watts to the 50s.

I also have a dell 600m with a pentium M chip that has the "centrino" sticker on it. The power draw from the laptop while idle with the screen off is 26 watts. If you run something it can jump up to the 60 watt range.

I've found that when buying PC parts, the hardest part to evaluate for power consumption is the motherboard because there are no specifications that really help you and the amount of parts used on the board vary. Just by replacing the motherboard in the athlon64 system, I could increase the idle wattage by 10 to 20 watts. I've also found that all motherboards are coming with more and more junk these days. There are few bare and basic full size motherboards for PCs. There are some companies that manufacture and sell small form factor itx size motherboards with laptop grade chipsets and parts, but the prices are usually insane.

Cool!

[Zubinix]

Put this in SBC (Single Board Computer) form together with wireless support and a nice sized flash hard drive would make it ideal for applications such as home monitoring and other uses around the typical house for us home automation geeks.

Re:Cool!

[Alioth]

ARM11 is already better for that kind of application - much lower power still, and for embedded stuff, the need for x86 compatibility really doesn't exist.

PVRs?

[ffejie]

Without actually taking the time to do any calculations, shouldn't this chip be a little weak to be powering PVRs and other media devices? With the proliferation of HD, I see more and more people (thankfully) going to h.264 to reduce their file sizes. However, to play a 720p file that is encoded with h.264, you need some serious punch in the processing realm. Recording/encoding to h.264 is a level far beyond that. I don't have the specs in front of me, but even the most minimal player is going to require more than 500 MHz. Now, if you're talking about a few of these in one system you may be on the right track. Anyone have more experience than me in this kind of thing and can comment further?

Redundand?

[spectrokid]

Isn't everybody always complaining how x86 is an awefull archtecture dragging 20 years of backward compatibility like a block of concrete? A one watt processor surely aims at the mobile/embedded market. Backward compatibility is not an issue there. I can't see anybody running his old Windows 3.11 accounting software on his mobile, and this thing won't come with a "Vista-ready" sticker...
Linux and Windows CE (or whatever they call it today) run just fine on ARM and similar. Will a low-power x86 compete performance-wise with a low-power RISK architecture?

Re:Redundand?

[aclarke]

There are lots of uses for a CPU like this. I, for example, run a VIA CPU/mobo in my truck. It draws very little current which means my auxilliary battery will run the computer for a lot longer. It also produces less heat than my AMD/Intel options, which means the computer needs no fans, which also saves power and keeps the system quieter. I run Windows XP on there as pretty much all the good GPS software runs on Windows. An ARM chip wouldn't do me much good there, unfortunately.

I agree though, this chip is never going to be the financial success that the Core2 is.

I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on power

[DrXym]

I wish the EU would start rating PCs by their energy consumption, perhaps accompanied by an energy tax for the worst categories. The amount of power in a modern PC from CPUs & GPUs wasted as heat, fans etc. is just ridiculous.

On a somewhat related note

[value_added]

Soekris is now shipping a New and Improved product, the net5501. Early reports suggest that this is their first product that's able to route at line speed. I have two on order that I should receive next week.

The release of Vista suggests that we need more and more powerful systems to do our work, but the irony, at least for me, is that I keep buying more of the little guys. Being able to use fanless cases and/or flash drives is a definite selling point, but there's a surprising amount of processing power available in such products and their uses are as limitless as your own imagination. Besides, hacking those ubiquitous blue boxes can never be as satisfying as building your own.

The VIA units I own could be described as underpowered, but having onboard MPEG decoders, for example, can make up for the shortcomings.

Re:Obligatory

[threaded]

Couldn't even keep a dorm room warm. Boo hoo.

Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po

[DrXym]

Everyone pays for the power they consume, be it gasoline or electricity. Who cares?

Exactly. Who cares? People are generally selfish and sometimes you must do things that benefit people as a whole instead of individuals. If slapping a tax on the most energy consuming devices in some category causes people to buy the more efficient ones, that is a benefit to every one. If you still want to buy that device despite the tax then nobody is stopping you. But I guarantee that for everyone who does than many more will choose one which doesn't.

It does not mean either that you're getting a crappier machine as a result. While there is a relationship between CPU / GPU performance and power, I doubt it is a 1:1 mapping. Some processors and GPUs are going to deliver more operations per watt than others. Companies and consumers should be encouraged to favour the more efficient designs over the less efficient designs and a tax for the worst offenders in any class is one way of going about that.

Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po

[XedLightParticle]

Not sure if parent was a joke, but i found it funny.

In some EU countries economic cars have less yearly tax already, I think it's calculated from the CO2 emission pr. km.
And cars that can't perform 15km/l or more, have had their price tax raised, while longer running ones have had it reduced.

Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po

[DrXym]

Ireland sets the rate of annual motor tax based on the size of the vehicle engine. Someone with a 1.6 litre engine pays over a hundred more euros than someone with a 1.3 litre engine. It's probably explains why SUVs are quite scarce in Ireland. Which isn't a bad thing at all.

Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po

[DrXym]

I mentioned 1.6L more as a way of showing that the scale goes up proportional with engine size. I have a 1.3L car (a Citroen C4 coupe) which has no trouble at all on Irish roads even with passengers. Naturally there are still luxury vehicles, SUVs on the roads, but the overall emphasis is generally on what Americans probably call compacts - hatchbacks, saloons and so on. Most of those are probably 1.6L or less with a lot of 1.3, 1.2 and 1.1 size engines. If you drive around in a 3L SUV in Ireland you're going to be raped by the tax man.

Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po

[KlaymenDK]

(I've found discussing car performance where USians can eavesdrop always leads to flaming. Still...)

In Denmark, a sizeable chunk of the total car park are small or family cars with engines in the 1.3-2.0L range. Sporty cars (Alfa Romeo et al, not Ferrari) are probably in the 2-3L range, no more. Of course the SUV-style cars will have way bigger engines (but I suspect that's more to help push the ego rather than the car).

A relevant tidbit: we pay ~7$ per gallon of petrol.

I drive a VW station wagon. It's 4 cylinders, 2L, 115bhp, ~1500kg. I don't have the stats for 0-60 (or 0-100) because I just don't drive that way, but its accelleration is quite adequate even without going over 3000rpm (usually I stay within 900-2500). I think I hit 4000rpm maybe three times a year. I average 7.3L/100km, or 32.2mpg.

My old car (Peugeot 206) had 1.4L and 75bhp to push its 975kg, and its performance was quite comparable (better low end, worse top end).

I lurk on an american classic car forum, and the rule of thumb there seems to be "(at least) 1bhp of power per 10lb og car", which translates to >300bhp for a station wagon, which again translates into race car (ok sports car) performance. I can't help wondering if that is really necessary for a family car, or a classic built for cruising.

Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po

[gnasher719]

'' 1.6L is considered big? I have a 2L 4cyl Focus in Canada, and that's considered "small" by our standards. Not that I really push my car, but I am curious as to how a 1.3L accelerates [to say hwy speeds]. Because even in my car I have to really floor it [re: 5000 RPM] to hit highway speeds before I exit the ramp, well that's exaggerating a bit. usually I hit speed before the dotted lines (that let you get out of the merging lane). So I probably could accelerate at like 3-4K RPM just fine. ''

Get a Diesel engine. Massive torque = massive acceleration. Not that much horse power, but that only matters at high speeds (100mph+) where you lose your driving license anyway.

In the UK, tax goes by carbon dioxide emission per km, engine size doesn't matter. There is a small number of cars that pay £35 per year, others pay between £115 and >£200 tax per year. But there are other differences: At the moment, you pay a £8 charge every time you drive into London. In the future, that will be free for cars with very low emissions, and up to £25 for very high emissions.

But the thing that really hits is company car tax. If you have a company car, you have to pay income tax on X percent of the value of the new car every year. X ranges from 15% to 35%, depending on carbon dioxide emissions. For a £20,000 car, you pay tax on £3000 to £7000, depending on emissions. At 40% tax rate, that is £1200 to £2800 tax, in other words up to £1600 punishment every year for high carbon dioxide emissions for a £20,000 car.

Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po

[pimpimpim]

Any start is a good start, and one is already been made for supercomputers: Next to the top500, a few people have started a new list, ranking supercomputers on performance per watt, the green500. This is actually not an easy task, as to be honest one also has to include the power consumption of the cooling. Taking into account that one server room can contain various supercomputers, some estimated guesses are needed.

With the relatively low cost and high availability of computing speed nowadays, the green500 list might become very important, as it is not only the environment-friendliness but also a lot of the running cost that is involved here.

Power rating

[Dolda2000]

I, too, do not agree with the GP's idea of actually taxing high-power computers, but I do think he might well have a point in just rating the computers after their power usage. If people buying computers see some real statistics of how much it is going to cost them in electricity to run their new computer, it is very likely that they are going to choose after that criterion, which will drive manufacturers to make more power-efficient computers. Which is good, because if they make computers that draw less power, then I, too, could get one of them and pay less for electricity (and having them run longer on the UPS :).

Screw you, I like feeding trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

0. Your use of punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and grammar makes me think you actually put effort into making it this crappy.
1. I point at my wrist because you aren't paying attention. You might not realize the words, but the motion is undeniable.
2. I search for the remote because while the channel may eventually be changed, the remote is still fucking missing.
3. Fuck you and your 4 pounds. Either you're part of the EU or you're not.
4. Maybe you're not waiting for a bus.
5. "Are you alright" is a simple of way of asking if you can talk, move, respond. If you don't, you're not. You probably deserved the punch anyway..