Single-Chip x86 Chipsets Around the Corner?

An anonymous reader writes "Kontron, a giant among industrial single-board computer vendors, yesterday revealed a credit-card sized board apparently based on a single-chip x86 chipset that clocks to 1.5GHz and supports a gig of RAM. It targets portable devices — not x86's usual forte. Kontron isn't saying whether the board uses a Via or an Intel chip(set) — both vendors reportedly have single-chip chipsets in the works, part of their respective missions to drive 'x86 everywhere.'"

Comments

Great idea

[nurb432]

If they can find a market for it. Its going to be hard to unseat the arm.

"generic" embedded devices come to mind. ( but you have the pc104 standard there already..

Re:Great idea

[Colin Smith]

Yah, but current ARM processors max out at about 700-900 mhz.

If they can really pull off a good, stable, low powered chipset in the 1.5 ghz range.. I would be very interested. Right. Because more gigahertz means faster.

Re:Great idea

[bombshelter13]

Yes. That's ~exactly and exclusively~ what more (giga)hertz means: it's faster.

Now, what it doesn't say anything about is whether it's higher performance.

Re:Great idea

[nurb432]

Arm is still lower power. That is pretty important.

But i do agree there is a large x86 codebase out there. ( but then again, there also is a decent sized codebase for ARM and other embedded processors )

x86 cores?

[heroine]

It would be huge if x86 or x86_64 was available as a core like MIPS & ARM. Life would be much easier for the set top boxes.

Re:x86 cores?

[0100010001010011]

Just like a monoculture of GSM has hurt the innovation of mobile phones in Europe.

God bless the USA where competition between GSM, CDMA, & what ever sprint uses has increased innovation such that the USA always has the best cellphones out of any civilized country.

Not that I don't think in

And Theo's quote can be found here: http://kerneltrap.org/OpenBSD/Virtualization_Security

"x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit. You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes."

Power consumption please?

[4D6963]

It targets portable devices -- not x86's usual forte

Yeah, that's not x86's usual forte because x86s are more power thirsty than say MIPS or ARM, which is why it would be interesting if the article could mention how much this new thing is supposed to drain.

Re:Who's in charge of code names?

[User 956]

"Codenamed "John," the processor will integrate CPU, northbridge, and southbridge..."

That was the best code name they could come up with? Seriously?

Given what they probably had to do in the area of patent licensing, calling it a "John" is pretty polite, if you ask me.

Sounds like a bad idea to me

[Vthornheart]

"'x86 everywhere.'"
Can I pass on that? The x86 architecture may be POPULAR, but it's inefficient, forced into backwards compliance with horribly outdated standards, and has been horseshoed for the past 20 years into a full architecture chip when the initial design was never meant to become like this.
If a realm of computing has x86 as the non-dominant chipset, I think that's a blessing and it should remain that way. You can't do anything about the PC market at this point, for example... but I think the motto should be "x86 only where it already exists" rather than "x86 everywhere."

Re:Sounds like a bad idea to me

[pla]

The x86 architecture may be POPULAR, but it's inefficient, forced into backwards compliance with horribly outdated standards, and has been horseshoed for the past 20 years into a full architecture chip

The "x86 architecture" doesn't exist. x86 merely describes an ISA exported by the microcode of whatever underlying architecture a given chip really uses. An ARM chip could look like an x86 chip. A PPC chip could look like an x86 chip. The Core2 or Athlon64 could just as well export a traditional Motorola ISA as the chosen x86 - and with modern chips, they could do so with a microcode patch at boot time, you wouldn't even need to buy a new chip!

Thus, any holy wars regarding its efficiencies or inefficiencies must remain firmly rooted in the ease of actually using it for coding. I do so, and find it for the most part adequate. It traditionally lacked enough GP registers, but even that doesn't hold true these days (at least for AMD's version - Not 100% sure about the Core line). And for that matter, very few coders even bother with ASM anymore... Even firmware development (which I also do) uses C almost exclusively nowadays.


Not to say I want to see it everywhere, but we can't really hold the flaws of ancient hardware with no current connection to the ISA against it.

Everything

[Anonymous Coward]

What would a chip have to include for VIA to codename it Jesus?

Literally.... *EVERYTHING*.

Including saving your (and my) miserable soul from going to hell.

Crap idea

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Single chip x86: Geode etc are a crap idea. The idea has been done to death and has never caught on. There's no real benefit in them. In the past there was some appeal in x86 because of good, cheap compilers etc. Now there's gcc for everything this advantage has long since disappeared.

ARM, and at a push MIPS, PowerPC and SH4 own this space. x86 needs to offer something huge to get back in the game.

Re:Crap idea

[cnettel]

GCC targets everything and still is more heavily optimized for x86. Despite that, it's FAR from the best x86 compiler around, performance-wise. The pool of people with a "can read, cannot write it good without great pain" grasp of x86 assembler is also damn huge.

Other x86-specific assumptions inherent in code (like atomic writes of different sizes, context switches limited to instruction boundaries) means that a platform porting of seemingly good multithreaded code can cause very subtle bugs. It's even possible to write Java code that is almost impossible to turn into a race condition on x86, but where you might do it on other platforms. You might argue that it's rare or that the code is "bad" and incorrect in the first place, but it's still there.

x86 should be like slavery in the 1820

[kiyoshilionz]

x86 has its market, the personal computer, but its legacy architecture should not be allowed to spread anywhere it has not already tainted. Remember Why Do We Use x86 CPUs? I thought x86 is something we want to eventually move away from (Remember VAX?), not something we want to spread.

Re:x86 should be like slavery in the 1820

[evilviper]

I thought x86 is something we want to eventually move away from

You were wrong. x86 isn't particularly impressive, but it's just a CPU, not a war crime.

It's pretty much inevitable that x86 will move into new areas, as embedded systems need more and more processing power for multimedia, x86 vendors spend more and more of money reducing power consumption, and the economies of software development more and more favor reusing x86 software, rather than spending time on optimizations for the other architectures you use.

Since Intel can't seem to make money on any architecture other than x86, they've eliminated their StrongArm/XScale line, and are replacing it with ultra-low-powered (sub-1watt) x86-based CPUs. VIA has long be trying to make inroads in the high-power, higher-performance embedded market with their own CPUs as well.