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End of the Road For AMD's Geode Chip
An anonymous reader writes "AMD has no replacement planned for the aging Geode low-power chip, creating uncertainty for its use in products like future XO laptops made by One Laptop Per Child. There won't be a Geode successor and the company has no core microarchitecture planned to replace the chip, AMD executives said. The comments end speculation about the future of Geode, an integrated chip used in netbooks like OLPC's XO laptop, ultramobile PCs and devices like set-top boxes."
last post... ever made with a geode...
What about transferring the job to Cyrix chips? With an Open Source installation there should be little problem transitioning.
Looks like the 3rd world will be running intels Classmate then :|
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
from the no-dept. dept.
This futuristic device was one of the earliest commercial uses of the Geode chip. Unfortunately at $400 it was overpriced, and 3Com never supported the firmware developed for it.
I wouldn't think a computer would run very well with this. I remember getting Geodes for Christmas and they were pretty cool to break open and look inside, but I doubt it would be able to run a computer especially after hitting it with a hammer!!!
Seems an odd decision when Intel is selling so many Atoms; the 'Athlon Neo' sounds interesting, but at 15W it's going to have a hard time competing with Atoms at 2-8W even with Intel's crappy inefficient chipsets attached to them.
If you look at embedded devices or set-top boxes, you realise you don't really want Intel or AMD made CPUs. Look at most mobile devices, they all run OMAP-based devices (ARM), because of their energy efficiency and price. It also makes a helluva lot more sense to go with a SoC (System on Chip), as soon as power and size are even remotely factors in the decision making.
It's not because AMD drops out of the low-power energy manufacturing that the world is going to end, it just means they're focusing on things they're good at. I don't really ever remember AMDs being particularly energy-efficient, not nearly as what some VIA CPUs manage. I'm not talking about the Atom either, which is a whole different area.
Maybe I'm going completely bonkers, but if I were to build a low-power system, Intel and AMD would be last on my list, by quite a margin.
FlightSim is dead. Cyrix is dead.
FTA: "Geode's origins can be traced back to the mid-90s when Cyrix developed the MediaGX integrated chip for sub-US$1,000 mainstream PCs, according to McCarron. Cyrix merged with National Semiconductor in 1999 and developed the first Geode chips for embedded devices from MediaGX design. AMD ultimately bought the Geode business from National Semiconductor in 2003" See also wikipedia, of course.
Sad how so many big companies buy these 'niche' technologies then 'manage' them into a smoking hole in the ground...
On the one hand, you can hardly blame AMD for pulling out of this market, when Intel has got it pretty much sewn up by doing such a great job with the Atom.
On the other hand, demand for chips like the Atom in netbooks is so high at the moment, AMD must be mad to be pulling out of this market.
I dunno. But perhaps AMD "ran the numbers" and decided that it wasn't competitive in the embedded marketplace. As the smaller of the two CPU rivals, it needs to be careful about which battles it chooses to fight and can't dip a toe into every niche market. The Athlon Neo looks like an interesting product, but it seems a little too power hungry for the tiny netbook market and definitely not for embedded devices other than perhaps set top boxes. Time will tell.
Geode was NIH and is low too poorly performing. So it was chopped, much like Intel chopped XScale from their lineups some time ago.
is no one interested in VIA's most recent offering here in this market. From what I've read it's a much better solution than the Intel Atom.. Does anyone make a system with the VIA processors though? I haven't seen any.
I have two questions that I don't believe are covered by the summary:
1) Is this the end of the line for the Geode?
2) Is the Geode used in the OLPC XO laptops?
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Its probably smart for AMD to leave this segment for now. VIA and ARM will have control of the ultramobile market for a while. Both companies offer high performance while keeping TDP extremely low. However, I can also see Intel being a major player in this segment in the future but, certainly not as big as ARM will be, especially if you look at some of the new ARM based OMAP processors Texas Instruments are comming out with. As for VIA, they initially sold their low power processors for embedded industrial systems, and have been moving to the consumer market ever since. Although not the most feature rich platform, it is still offers alot for its price, helping make VIA be here for a long time.
Yeah, and even lower than that are the ALIX boards from PC Engines. They are around $100-$135 for the board (add $25 for a case and AC-DC converter), and like the Soekris boxes come in smaller form factors than MiniITX.
I really hope that something fills the niche that the geode had. There aren't really any offerings using VIA or Atom processors at those prices and form factors. There are a ton of single-board-systems that use ARM or Freescale (which should be better picks anyway) but the fact is that not all software has as good of support for those other platforms as they do for x86, so for a hobbyist the geode boards often required less work to get running.
AMD is NOT halting production of the Geode. They are not leaving the market (RTFM!). They have decided that it serves it's niche AS IS and will be kept AS IS. That's a very different statement. They're saying that it is a mature product (a rare thing in IT).
Currently, the Geode is good enough for many applications and would be a step up for others. The embedded world tends away from the shiny object model of upgrades. If it worked last year, it works this year, and it'll work next year. Changes in the product are considered undesirable.
AMD's statement doesn't even mean there won't be a die shrink or even a faster Geode in the future, just that they won't be updating it's architecture.
It's not a bad decision either. There is a significant niche for the Geode between the Atom (too hot, too power hungry) and things like the Dragon Ball and mips (not enough power).
Geode isn't in trouble until Intel comes out with an x86 that doesn't need a heatsink (or at least doesn't need a fan).
I guess I won't be able to upgrade to a new Geode when this one dies. I'd have to say the little thing works quite well, 4 sata ports, software raid-5, tons o' storage, running a webserver and numerous other servers... Oh well, AMD looses another customer I suppose.
-=JML=-
I've been looking at those, but unfortunately they're not very good when it comes to video/audio decoding. The "Internet" appliance space already is pretty saturated since it's relatively easy to do. The multimedia appliance space is harder because either one needs a more powerful PC (meaning more heat, electricity, and noise), or a lower powered processor with dedicated ASICS and not many SBCs have those.
I've used Geode systems in tiny little ALIX boxes that measure about 6"x6"x1" and then installed pfSense on them for firewall duties.
They work great and have enough grunt to push 50-80Mbps. More than enough for your typical internet connection. With better NICs (the ones embedded on the ALIX don't do much in the way of CPU offload or interrupt mitigation) it could push more. And they do this while drawing about 4 watts. Yeah, seriously!
CPU power is a bit lacking if you need to push a bunch of VPN traffic, but if you do, a cheap Sempron based system will push a lot of VPN traffic while drawing only about 30w total if you build it right.
Someone will buy the tape and IP and continue development... if not, there's always Via....
A story so insignificant that there exists no wittily-named department from which the news broke? Blast.
that $6K TCO must have been calculated with the Windows OS installed. Sounds about right for any Windows device. ;-)
As far as the ClassmatePC goes, the only good that was is that it would also generate alot of sales of diesel generators to power the classrooms using the ClassmatePC. FYI, Intel had to ship a generator to be installed outside the room of one of their ClassmatePC pilots because the kids batteries were failing before the day was done.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Perhaps this is a good opportunity for the open hardware people to fill a void.
Not only could you fill the lost Geode business, you could potentially surplant companies like ARM.
I think the most interesting development of netbook microprocessors is the rejuvination of mips. That and ARM9. when a laptop is used to type and surf with low power and form factor, why use x86?
Why did this even get greenlit as an article? They don't have a replacement architecture ready? STOP THE PRESSES!!! They don't have a replacement architecture yet, either, for the rice paddy, but it's not like this is something of concern or even interest.
List of 8051 manufacturers.
An interesting phenomenon has occurred in instruction sets. Things have stratified into approximately four layers. Each layer is more expensive, takes more power, and has higher capabilities. At the high end are x86 CPUs which have stuck with x86 for software compatibility. Below the x86 CPUs are ARM processors. Below that are vendor specific instruction sets. And, at the very bottom, x86 again!
For really, really low powered hardware applications where you really don't care about performance, x86 is king. The kind of applications where you take a 16 MHz chip and under-clock it to 500 kHz to save power.
I have a few of these chips in the PIC. The case is about the size of a brick, I replaced the hard drives with solid state drives and they work good for X terminals or to use the browser locally to check email on web sites.
Assume you have a $100 processor with 40% gross profit margin, you sell 1,000,000 units and make $40,000,000
Assume you have a $20 processor with 80% gross profit margin, you sell 2,000,000 units and make $32,000,000
Hard to feed the same number of mouths with $32M that you did with $40M, right?
The market needs to be much bigger to support the much lower actual selling price of a $10 chip like atom, rather than a $100 core2 or i7. Even with double the gross profit margin and double the volume, it's hard to see how to get there (and of course lots of those netbook just canabalize the sales of notebook which makes it even harder).
Why?
Well, for one I can take it into any meeting without annoying my colleagues with the constant fan noise. It doesn't get warm. It's completely silent. It looks cute, women tend to be drawn to it, and it's a doddle to use.
The Acer excels in multimedia applications and to watch movies on, but for day to day work, I schlep my XO around with me.
Why this is a non-issue
AMD is still producing Geode processors to fill existing orders. And presumably they will keep making them as long as people buy them. The Geode processors changed substantially over time, so there is nothing to suggest that the next Geode would have been a drop-in replacement for the next XO, and it is unlikely that the next XO will use the same motherboard anyway.
Geodes that Rock
Today you can do better than the Geode in terms of price-performance. But it has certain characteristics that make it a winner, and you can buy a lot of Geode-based products right now which are wonderful. The x86 compatibility means that you can use standard operating systems and drivers, et cetera. Probably the best buys in a Geode processor come from PC Engines from whom you can buy a whole geode-based system with dual MiniPCI, quad USB2, a little RAM and a CF slot ideal for a household server/AP complete with Atheros-based WiFi for about $200. We're talking audio and video here, too, although it's not going to win any performance awards.
I recently (yesterday morning) acquired a DT Research WebDT 360 tablet. It's got a really nice 8.4" TFT @ 800x600 res, a USB2 port (plus one or two more inside) and MiniPCI WiFi as well as bluetooth and some buttons. Mine came with WinCE 5 but I intend to roll my own build of Familiar Linux to keep the install size low. The system's internal storage is a 512MB Disk-On-Chip, but it also has a hidden CF slot. This system has an AMD Geode LX 800 (500MHz; it is often misadvertised as 800MHz on eBay and even in official product literature) which has MMX and 3dNow! instructions, acceleration for AES encryption, and a TDP of 3.6W. Typical consumption is 1.8W! It is horribly hard to beat this with x86 compatibility. You can pick these up under $300 right now - original starting price is over $1200 for some reason. They do have a lovely alloy case...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
anyone know what Intel's planning to do with the Itanium?
JIC anyone is wondering, I've heard that these have about a 25% failure rate out of box :P Also the company is spectacularly unhelpful. They will refuse to even give you full specs on the units. If you have a choice, buy something else. I did however manage to get into the BIOS (if at first you don't succeed, try a different keyboard) but so far can't manage to attach a keyboard and a storage device at the same time. I have been corresponding with someone who has some patches etc. I just need some quality time with broadband so I can get an Angstrom image going.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"