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

Re:Great idea

[truesaer]

AMD makes a whole line of embedded x86 processors. http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/ProductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863,00.html

Who's in charge of code names?

[KevinKnSC]

From the article:

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

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

Re:Who's in charge of code names?

[brit74]

Via's code names are almost always biblical:

* Luke
* Esther
* Nehemiah

I'm still looking forward to the Satan and Whore of Babylon chipsets.

Re:Great idea

[Calmiche]

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.

I am still waiting for a revival of the handheld computers. UMPC isn't going anywhere, Palm is getting out of most hardware.

HP is FINALLY getting back into the handheld market, but it's WAY late for it's projections and dosen't seem to be doing any advertising at all for it's new line.

'x86 everywhere.'

[geekoid]

What did we do to you to deserve this?

It's VIA

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

If the chip is codenamed John, as the article claims, it's a VIA chipset. VIA uses biblical names for their CPU codenames.

Previous VIA CPU codenames:

Samuel
Esther
Nehemiah
Ezra

Note also that VIA combined a C3 CPU and a northbridge into a single package - it was codenamed "Luke".

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 The x86 architecture may be POPULAR, but it's inefficient, forced into backwards compliance with horribly outdated standards, and has been horseshoed for the past 20 years into a full architecture chip when the initial design was never meant to become like this.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.

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

[spirit of reason]

I am still waiting for a revival of the handheld computers

You mean something like the Pandora?

Also, more information here.

While it's technically meant more for a gamer market like the GP2X, the arm + linux + wifi + usb host + decent resolution screen might make it a more general purpose machine.

x86 programming

[neapolitan]

It's a shame that the x86 is such a complex instruction set; this means that the age of the handheld computer as an easy programming platform for hacking is over.

When I was programming for Apple //e, I had a good majority of the opcodes for the 6502 chip memorized, laying out assembly by hand. I later learned 68k assembly, and again, it is very "understandable" to a person just sitting down in front of the computer looking at an assembly printout. In the early 90's, pretty much x86 dominated and I stopped doing pretty much all assembly programming.

In 1996 I was delighted when the palm pilot came out, using a 68328 (68k instruction set). It was like a renaissance, again programming in assembly and hacking other things for fun. Now, once again, it appears this will be dead!

As a question to the slashdot community, is it possible to program "naked" x86 assembler? I have never really put in the time to learn it, but it just seems exceedingly complex and tedious to program for this chip without use of a higher level crutch (C compiler...) I am sad that once again everything I know is becoming outdated... :)

Re:x86 programming

[Waffle Iron]

but it just seems exceedingly complex and tedious to program for this chip without use of a higher level crutch (C compiler...) I am sad that once again everything I know is becoming outdated... :)

You sure are outdated. Today's "higher level crutch" is Python.

What would it take?

[Zaphod-AVA]

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

Re:What would it take?

[Kagenin]

A built-in WINE environment.

Re:What would it take?

[makapuf]

Flash memory (or some storage). Remember JESUS SAVES !

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: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."

Re:Power consumption please?

[RightSaidFred99]

This isn't true because of some "law" that says x86 must be power hungry, it's true because nobody's really sat down and done an x86 processor for the embedded market, or at least not donw well. Check out Silverthorne, it has power use comparable to MIPS/ARM.

More info for x86 in embedded dev. at arstechnica

[IYagami]

You can find articles about the use of x86 in embedded devices at arstechnica, from Jon Stokes:

Return of the Son of Pentium in 2008? Intel's new ultramobile processors

Intel's low-cost "Diamondville" CPU to power OLPC/Eee PC mobile category

And a very interesting article why processor makers want to extend their architecture to other realms: Beyond the BlackBerry crowd: life in a post-32nm world

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.

Re:I hope not.

[Sillygates]

It's already obsolete(in terms of size), and this is not news :(
pico itx is already on the maket, the mainboard is about the same size (1.5ghz [like that means anything], upto 1gb ram):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico-ITX

and the transmeta crusoe processor (which implemented x86 in software) has been out for almost a decade now. The sony picturebook has a credit card sized motherboard along the left side of it's case:
http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&um=1&q=sony+picturebook&btnG=Search+Images

How about a better summary first?

[mr_mischief]

Yeah, because there haven't been 386, 486, and other systems on a chip and Via doesn't have a 1-watt processor anywhere to be found. This is not the first 1-chip chipset for all of the x86 line. That's bullshit. An SoC is even more integrated than just having the chipset as one chip. Somebody never read the old Computer Shopper before it slimmed down. SoC solutions for x86-compatible systems have been around more than a decade. The summary is bad, because TFA does not say this is a first for the x86 line.

You're right that even low-powered x86 chips like the C7 and the Geode line are generally no match for ARM and XScale. MIPS I'm not as familiar with for power usage purposes. It'd be nice if that question was answered, but I'm afraid it'd be summarized incorrectly too.

2005 article on anx86 SoC
another 2005 article about a different x86 SoC
2004 product page for an already obsolete x86 SoC
Linux Devices list of x86 SoC solutions, some dated to 2000
2000 Register article about the year since Cyrix released an x86 SoC
Chipslist page showing availability of AMD processor with 80188 features plus DMA, watchdog timer, serial ports, and I/O pins in 1995
article on the National Semiconductor Geode (the owners of that line before AMD bought it) thin client system-on-chip

And the best proof of all: an archive of a 1996 story on the AMD Elan,which featured a 386, ISA bus, serial UART, memory controller, power management, and PLL hardware ON ONE CHIP

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.

Re:Great idea

[afidel]

When you're comparing a superscaler, out of order, multipiplined x86 chip vs an ARM? Yeah I think the 2x faster chip will win, in fact even at the same mhz the x86 part would most likely be faster. Now the question is, is it capable of more MIPS/WATT, which is what matters almost as much as absolute performance in the embedded space. There the answer is possibly but unlikely.