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National Semiconductor unveils their PC-on-a-chip
KevinRemhof writes "National Semiconductor unveiled their Geode family of chips. The SC1400 chip has video and PC functions built in. The memory and other features require separate chips. The target audience is set-top boxes. Expect to see the first ones by next summer. This is a bold move shortly after selling off Cyrix to Via Technologies. " As other articles point out, they are trying to save themselves by moving into a less-competitive area of the market.
A Linux port of a piece of hardware?
And, as Cyrix was very open and helpful with the Linux ports (IIRC, the sound blaster emulator in the MediaGX set is considered the reference design for how to do it by Alan Cox)(please correct me if I am wrong -- that is from memory). This should be very little actual work. I hope that NS releases copies to the usual suspects ASAP. Also, the companies that will be wanting to use this are the same ones looking for a stable, small, and robust OS. No, that doesn't sound like "embedded NT" to me either. So one way or another we will get something soon.
... no moving parts ...
I am hoping for better $300 NCs (I know what is out there -- I need better resolution than IBM thinks is worthwhile -- 1024x768 @ 60kHz @ 256 color is not cool), myself. Mmmmmmm
After 48 hours of coding, I start to believe that I can pick up vibrations from everything ... but it may be that my hands are shaking from the radiation protection juice so much that I am making stuff vibrate ...
More like what year is Halla coming from. Oh well, at least he didn't say that Linux was made by punks in Sweden ...
> ... [National Semiconductor] are trying to save themselves by moving
> into a less-competitive area of the market.
If true, obviously NatSemi hasn't been paying attention. Microsoft has
been buying their way into the set-top box market in a big way. Does US$5
billion invested in AT&T in return for promises to deploy a greater number
of Wince-based set-top boxes not ring a bell?
"Less-competitive area." Yeah, right.
Well, OK, that was funny. I do hope, in all seriousness, that NS makes this one work, considering how bad they screwed up the Cyrix line.
Damn -- hit Submit instead. MEEPT indeed.
What I meant to add was that I would love to see this chip in a laptop. I would love to have something that would run for 20 hours on a battery with 128+MB and 14GB that didn't cost $6000 (I like Thinkpads, but they aren't cheap), and this would be a good way to really cut costs.
And yeah, I want these in cheap, commodity Xterms, all over the place. Take the disk away from the users, and give it to those who will use it for Doo^H^H^Hdata and helping the bottom line;)
Yup, diskless workstations sounds great and cheap. I just hope that it has a "normal" (i.e., PC-like, i.e., microATX or baby AT) setup, with PCI slots in the expected places. FIC? Are you listening?
well, the little birdies in Austin have been saying that this is coming again with a shrunken K6-3 core at .18, probably copper, possibly SOI, and with cache in 0k, 128k, and 256k flavors, depending on the pocketbook, allowing a very low power (166MHz at under 1.5 watts with 256k L2 on-chip cache is what I am hearing, less than a watt with 0k cache) fully integrated solution, including a DSP for any sort or network (can do Ether or Token or ADSL or several at the same time) and enough power to do voice recognition. If that can beat the GX core here, cool. I like K6s anyway. Even better, this is supposed to go to 500MHz for the same setup, allowing a 500MHz/256k system on a chip pulling less than five watts, and all of this by mid-next year, when the .8v 256Mb 40ns flash chips come on line at $.25/MB at AMD (and when every other manufacturer is moving to .18 micron or smaller 1Gb PC-133 or PC-266 chips, making a very small PC with 128MB RAM and 32MB flash and the power of a desktop dirt cheap and ever-present.
Yes, I think AMD will be doing just fine.
As for the person who noted the "flashing 12:00" problem, think of what will happen when you can speak to your VCR ("do what I tell you, not what I said, you infernal machine!")!
It's Friday. We're tired.
I suppose something like this could be the basis of a wearable. But what I really want is an integrated PC-Onna-Chip without the video, but with built-in 100mb networking. Then we can start putting together single board beowulf systems!
Note to humor impaired -- I am not entirely serious, I am aware there are probably better ways to hook up PC-Chip beowulf clusters.
Well, I am thinking that if I have a budget of $2000 per desk for equipment, I can buy:
$1000 PC
$500 tube
$500 M$ software
OR
$1100 PC (with 256MB RAM, good for many, many years)
$850 tube
$50 Linux guru time to get it all set right one, forever
OR (my favorite)
$300 "appliance" (X Term, NC, whatever)
$1650 kick ass flat panel tube (saving $100 per tube per year in power and cooling)
$50 same Linux guru time
I like the last.
There could also be
$300 "appliance"
$1000 nice Trinitron tube
$50 same guru time
keep $650 for big disk in the back room and all
And this is before the wonderful ROI that not buying moving parts gets you with anything like these appliances. My NCD at home has outlasted one Trinitron and seems likely to outlast the second one. Maintenance costs? $0. Seven years now.
Bring on the PC replacements, save everyone's eyes (better, larger, 85kHz tubes running at 16 bit color), and save lots of money.
what the performance of a chip with all I/O, video, etc... running at 266 MHZ or faster will be?
We need every one of these to ship with a paid for ssh and RSA licence in the flash RAM on the board. I would pay for it to keep the marketing morons out of my fridge, underwear drawer, and Mistress Helga's Buns of Steel tapes.
Seriously, and this is hard for me as I know how much really useful stuff you can get out of bulk longitudinal data collection, there need to be limits imposed before the abuse starts, not after. Imagine figuring out who is likely to have an addictive personality from other aspects of their life and then peppering them with ads for on-line gambling? You would ruin the lives of people. As I learned in marketing class at the University of Texas at Austin's Graduate School of Business, that is not OK, that is fantastic, because it is not illegal and you make money. "Ethics" my professor said "are determined by what the law does not allow." I have never forgotten that and I have real concerns about what an industry full of those people will do with this.
"Mistress Helga's Buns of Steel tapes"?
...
You and the buggering guy and the "hairy men named Guido" guy should get together
I have spent years watching secretaries play Solitaire on 17" and then 21" monitors while I had a 15" monitor because we both had $3500 to spend. I think that I want the secretary to have an "appliance" with Solitaire in the RAM (boot it off the fscking network for all I care -- boot it off of a flash card) and I want the money that she was spending on a CPU, because baby needs a brand new EMC array and he ain't getting it spending cash so that secretaries can play Solitaire.
Grrrrrr.
You see, this is why I like X and small UNIX versions and powerful boxes to run them all. It keeps the money where it can do good -- in the machine room.
It's Friday. We're tired.
I don't know what Mistress Helga has been up to lately, but I think that she has been working on HP-UX. Yes, this is offtopic, but have you ever seen anything like HP-UX. My Ghod, it just gets worse and worse. SD-UX anyone? Makes me really see the grace and beauty and marvelous simplicity and obvious clarity of thought in dselect.
Why do I use Linux? Because HP-UX must die.
Tetris boards are only 15x9 if I remember correctly. That leaves plenty of room for the next piece display and binary readouts of your score, level, and playing time :)
Daniel
The integrated computers can be more optimized and more powerful because all of the components of the computer are integrated into one chip so all of the components can be accessesed very quickly and will thus make computers much more powerful....imagine a system bus running at full CPU speed!
We should hit 20ghz in a little less then 5 years. Yay.
I want Quad 20ghz CPUs on my toaster, (1 for each bread slice thingy).
http://www.amd.com/products/lpd/19181g.pdf
I think that this is what you were talking about. Still very much alive.
A random neuron just fired off in my brain, and got me thinking strange thoughts. If embedded processors in home appliances become ubiquitous, does that mean we stop using phrases like, "He's dumber than a toaster." I can image in our lifetime our grandchildren asking, "I don't understand grandpa, that toaster has dual 20 Ghz processors in them that are programmed to understand 140 different languages.":-)
Oh well, my favorite phrase will hopefully never become obsolete: If he was any dumber, we would have to water him.
Here's a PC onna Chip! You can have it for real cheap, and that's Cuttin' Me Own Throat!
(Note to the humor impaired: If you haven't read Terry Pratchett, don't bother trying to understand this comment.)
--synaptik
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
Already there. Try ftp.kernel.org.
Seriously, it's just an enhanced MediaGX chip( (read: x86 clone). There might not be a driver for the MPEG decoder or the TV stuff yet, but the rest should work like any other Intel/AMD/Cyrix/etc chip.
Anyone else notice the date on the ZDnet article that was linked as 'other articles'? Look close and check it out:
;-)
National Semiconductor unveils 'PC on a Chip'
April 6, 1998 9:20 AM PDT
Interesting.
Topher
Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/
Kriston
... by spitting diet code all over when I read this!
The rest of you who are replying with arguments, where's your sense of humor?
-- Craig Miller Austin, TX
Space versus Time.
Optimization versus Portability.
Integrated chips:
1. Take more time to develop and make.
2. Are suited specifically to the task at hand.
3. Are not easily upgradeable.
4. Are not as powerful as they could be due to the limits imposed by small size and close proximity.
Distributed solutions (within the same chipset OR clustering solutions)
1. Take less time to make.
2. Are more flexible.
3. Are less optimized.
4. Have communications overhead between components. (Backpropagation? Crosspropagation? Whuzzat?)
5. Generally are more powerful.
6. Take up more space.
Trends have moved between integrating (wow, less overhead than those wacky multi-piece solutions!) and multi-piece solutions (wow, more powerful than that weak and non-upgradeable integrated solutions!) So the fanfare here won't last long I promise.
Although a beowulf of these things would have the best of both worlds... right?
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
Umm, what happens if you want a new video card? do you have to get a completely new chip?
That is so cool... another useless thinga-majig to add to my dock!
But... it does run at 64*64, which is just over 4 times as big as 30*30..
Jeff
So, when can we see a linux port for this thing? That is the real question.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
1998, according to an earlier post.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Strange, the claim that this device is first.
Even the device number is strangely similar to
AMD's SC400, which is a 486-100 core with all
typical motherboard peripherals on-board (minus
memory). BTW, the SC400 does run linux nicely.
Maybe the new National chip contains a higher level of integration than previous devices, but it's still hardly the 'first'. What about National's previous attempt at this sort of thing, which was based on a 486 core and lacked an MMU,
if I recall correctly.
You don't _watch_ your video card to see what's going on with your machine, do you?
/. without a subject of JOKEJOKEJOKEJOKEJOKE.
Nope. And you'd think I'd know better than to post a joke to
I'll learn some day.
I'm all for technology, but I'm buggered if I'm going to use a PC on a chip. The built-in monitor -- even if it's built into the heat sink -- can't possibly have a resolution greater than about 30x30. That's not even enough to play tetris.
These are not going to replace your average desktop in most cases. Some low end users might go to it, but not many. What is more likely is that people will own one or two desktop systems and one or two of these low end "information appliances". I would love to stick one in the kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, etc. Then I could catch some news, weather, read email, whatever and not be confined to my desk. Setup a household LAN, mp3-inate my CDs and any of these boxes could pump out tunes anywhere in my house. Imagine a clock radio with one of these... wake up to mp3s, program more complex alarms (don't wake me up on the weekends, holidays, etc... If I'm not up in 10 minutes, be as obnoxious as possible), read time off the net (no more setting the time), with a small display, it could hit wunderground.com (or any other web site, email box, etc) when the alarm goes off.
The theme is: give your average appliance more brains and the possibilities are endless.
The catch is: how many people do you know that can't program their VCR, let alone fathom these options?
Smart appliances will happen. It seemed unimaginable and almost ridiculous 20 years ago that most households would have at least one computer and that most of them would be connected by a global network. Smart appliances seem ridiculous to most people now, but it won't in 10 years.
> I doubt the average user will ever own two
> desktop systems.
I the unwashed masses get cable modems, then they really ought to have a dedicated firewall. Last semester I set up a firewall between my network and the dorm ethernet. I logged one malicious hach attempt, portscan, or other silliness every week. The company I'm working for is making a nifty little firewall-in-a-box. It has 2 ethernet ports, StrongArm, linux, whatever in a 6x6x1 inch box. It's nifty.
I have been brutally exposed to the "real world" recently (I like using quotation "marks" arbitrarily), and I doubt the average user will ever own two desktop systems. Aside from costs from moniters and other nonsharable peripherals, the average user can't set up a LAN, unless someone, and I'm thinking of a hypothetical God here, could make Plug 'n' Pray live up to its expectations. As for your wired house, I think that when that sort of thing becomes affordable, it will be on a USB-like I/O port. I just pray that we don't end up with proprietary toast protocols, and suchlike.
As for VCR's, the most I am willing to grant them, excepting Stevie Wonder, is that they might be marginally more bright than hamster.
I think this is backwards. It is scary to think some day your microwave might access the web to get a recipe. Another oportunity for orginizations to collect data on you.
It might be cool If the aplliance had a secure linux web server. Allowing you to browse in and contol it, but the other way arround is very scary.
"National said its new chip will lead to even lower cost PCs and other low-cost "information appliances." Halla predicted PC prices could fall to $400 to $500 with National's new chips."
What is up with this?
---HAM CALL -- KB7EXY---