Slashdot Mirror
AMD Releases 2 Low-Power 64-bit Processors
rwiggers writes "AMD has released two new low power processors for embedded apps. With a power of 18W and a chipset with 3W of average consumption [PDF] it seems we may have some interesting competition with Intel's Atom."
Low-power chips are great for low-load servers. I bought a cheap-o Atom nettop, no bigger than a DVD player, slapped a 2TB disk in, and installed Linux. Bam--instant offsite rsync server for my backups. The whole system uses less power than a lightbulb, makes almost no noise, and has a fanless CPU!
It may not be right for a high-load AJAX web app platform or for an HTPC, but the low power chips are more than enough for sufficiently responsive linux+ssh server.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I don't understand why some seemingly rather simple applications would require a large amount of processing power.
When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
.
Trolling is a art,
Compared to the common Atom + 945, AMD's new offering should(assuming it is reasonably priced) absolutely murder the Atom. The atom itself is a pretty low power chip(albeit slower than any A64); but the 945 is a nasty power hog, and has lousy 3D performance. An A64 and Radeon IGP in the same power envelope is hardly even fair, no contest, game over.
On the other hand, intel also has a low power atom chipset, with the "GMA500" they licenced from PowerVR. That particular combination will be weaker than this AMD offering; but it'll come in at something like 25% of the power draw.
This should, assuming it can score enough design wins to actually be buyable in a form other than trays of 1,000, be excellent competition for the Atom+945(being substantially more powerful, in the same thermal envelope), should be quite competitive with Atom+Ion(GPU performance will likely be a wash, CPU performance will be better, power envelope similar); but it won't have much effect on Atom+GMA500(substantially faster; but markedly higher power draw will keep it out of the smaller devices).
I'd love to see these show up in mini desktop systems, or the new thin and light slightly-larger-than-netbook laptops that are showing up.
Intel's netbook Atoms run at 2.5W/11.8W right now -- already beating them out for power usage. Because of how important battery life is to netbook users, I don't think this has much hope of competing there. Intel does have other higher-power Atom CPUs that aren't meant for netbooks, so maybe that's the market AMD is going for. I'd be curious to see how large that market is, though.
.
Maybe, but not by much - reports suggest the Atom costs less than $10 to manufacture. At that price any savings between processor types is pretty tiny unless you're deploying a vast number of them.
There's so much x86 development though, I'd imagine x86, and especially windows programmers, are much easier to find and cost less to hire. The processor cost in a POS system is going to be a tiny fraction of the total when you add in touch screens, bar code scanners, cash drawers, scales etc etc.
From the manufacturer's point of view it can probably develop software faster and cheaper using .net and it's that saving that probably drives lots of x86 uptake in these sorts of devices.
I didn't look at individual pricing, but the AMD Turion Neo X2 L625 is alread being offered in a laptop from HP - listed at a base of $569.99 but the processor is a $75 upgrade... or so you think, as soon as you select it you are told you need to upgrade the video card as well!
Either way, they wasted no time getting this on the market. The price seems competetive with the Intel Atom model.
I'm sure it's just a matter of time before Intel one-ups them though.
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
Okay, so the 18W number is "thermal design power"... sigh, another bloody spec.
Is this a typical spec that is used for comparison? I ask because I've been an electrical engineer for 15 years and, up until now, have done fine with "typical power consumption" (which is supposedly 3 W for this chip, compared to 7 W for the Intel Atom Z530) and "maximum power consumption", which is what you have to design the power supply around, lest the supply rails brown out.
Sigh... like they say: "A datasheet writer can get twice the performance out of a chip that an engineer can."
Blame software. If you look around, a surprising number of POS systems are running some sort of XP embedded + POS graphical bloatware combination. (Dell's offerings in the area are more or less representative, if you are morbidly curious). Obviously, POS functions could be(and were) done on seriously weedly embedded hardware. Trouble is, if your business is already running quickbooks or something, and they want their cash register to integrate, the path of least resistance is to buy quickbooks' cash register product, which is a giant pile of bloat that only runs on full systems. On a global scale, you'd probably save money by rebuilding it to run on embedded ARM or something; but any individual economic actor is better off just buying a (still shockingly cheap) general purpose X86.
You still don't need 64 bits for that; but all of AMD's designs(aside from some of their old Geode gear, and maybe embedded products based on Athlon XPs, if you can still buy those) are based on Athlon 64 cores, and they would save essentially nothing by disabling 64 bit capability, and might lose in certain applications that do require 64 bit support, so they might as well ship with it.
It's a guarantee of availability.
The typical lifetime of a CPU package is a year or 18 months.
Embedded designers want to be able to design around something that won't disappear next year right when they've got the bugs out and they're ready to ship.
I'm sure it's just a matter of time before Intel one-ups them though.
Always has been that way. Hopefully AMD will in turn one up Intel again, and the competition thrives. I remember back in the days of the K6-2 series of processors when an AMD chip never beat an Intel chip at anything other than price. You bought AMD not for any performance reason but because it was "good enough" and cost half of what an Intel chip did. It's great that AMD eventually reached a point when they DID beat Intel on price AND performance for a while. I know they've been slipping some, but I hope they keep it up.
Don't get me wrong - I'm no fanboy (I've got 5 machines right now - a Linux box, a Mac, and a Windows laptop, all running Intel chips, and a HTPC and my Windows desktop running AMD chips, so I actually have more Intel than AMD at the moment), but I really do hope that AMD survives, if only to keep Intel in check. Their prices are also still very competitive. I'm looking at replacing the aging Celeron 2.66Ghz chip in my Linux machine, and figured I'd like to go quad-core on it (it's my only remaining single core machine). Cheapest Intel Quad Core? $160. Cheapest AMD Quad Core? $80. It's a tad slower, but as a bonus the AMD chip burns about 30% less power as well. Looks like it's gonna be an AMD for that machine.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Assuming you're half the Linux fanatic you're coming off as, I'm sure you already know that no one has more open documentation than AMD/ATI. Hell their open documentation and support is pretty much keeping them alive on Linux, seeing how their drivers are still inferior to those of nvidia. So because they didn't have an entire article promising to do what they're already doing, you're complaining?
All AMD has to do to kill the Atom is to not impose asinine restrictions (e.g. screen size <11.7") on its usage. It's as simple as that. Do that, and you will kill a good piece of the much more expensive Core 2 Duo market as well since that's what Intel is trying to foist off on the anything-larger-than-what-we-define-as-a-netbook market.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."