What is Digg?68 Comments
- geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -6/+84This is hilarious. It might do 1W @ 500MHz, but that's actually about three times as much power as a decent ARM needs at 500MHz (300-400mW depending on what extras you want to throw in). And the ARM would perform better on almost every benchmark (minus float point if it's FP-less, minus vector if it's SIMD-less, but both are options for an ARM11 which this would compete with). And let's not even talk about idle power usage (10-50mW for the ARM, 100+ for the Eden). All of this just to keep the x86 instruction set, tsk tsk.
It's a real shame nobody wants to do a real laptop-scale ARM, when it'd be pretty damn easy to cram 4 ARM13's into a single package, wire them up using the AMBA bus and get twice the battery life at the same performance as most modern laptops. Sure it'd probably cost a bit more at first (as everything does), but damn would that be a nice machine. If only Palm would pull its head out of its ass on the Foleo and make it happen... - santaliqueur, on 10/10/2007, -4/+55What is this, Slashdot? You guys are 3 reply levels deep, you're supposed to be talking about George Bush or lolcats by now.
- geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -2/+27You're vastly mistaken. There actually were desktop Acorn RISC Machine (ARM ;) boxes shipped about 10 years ago, I've still got one in my attic somewhere, back when the machines weren't even a quarter as powerful as they are today. There's absolutely nothing stopping anyone from building a motherboard with current PC-like hardware and dropping a few ARM cores in a package, just as there's nothing stopping anyone from doing it with PowerPC (like Apple used to) or SPARC (like Sun used to).
x86 is braindead in embedded devices and arguably laptops, even though Intel's damned close with their lower power A100s. The same machine with an ARM would be just as fast and last twice as long on battery. The big problem is, nobody gets that if they wrote portable C to begin with, rebuilding it on any architecture's a snap. Just look at what Apple was able to accomplish, transparently switching processor architectures (twice).
The Foleo is damned close to being my dream machine, but Palm's going to ***** it up, simply because they're leaving out so many features and trying to make it a "phone dependent" device. - arcooke, on 10/10/2007, -1/+25Nice to see someone comment on a digg story and actually know what they're talking about. Kudos to you, geminitojanus.
- psykiv, on 10/10/2007, -2/+16Stick your tongue in an electric outlet and find out.
- mateo60, on 10/10/2007, -3/+15Funniest thing I've read all day.
- Aliasing, on 10/10/2007, -7/+17I understand your respect for the ARM specifications, but I think you undervalue the advantages of x86, given that it is the only deployed non-integrated consumer computer architecture currently on the market. Also, and please correct me if I am mistaken, but I don't believe a non-integrated component based "desktop" ARM design would even be possible......
Edit: Okay so the Foleo is theoretically being built with it, I concede that point, though I think it is a big step from fully integrated Palm unit, to desktop/laptop environment. - mooninite, on 10/10/2007, -1/+10Linux and Symbian are already very flexible on an ARM. You could easily build a desktop PC with an ARM.
- misterS, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8It's what digg used to be 2 years ago.
- brownb2, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7You're probably being dugg down by techies. The reason that we don't use the x86 design in small devices is because the architecture is some 30 years old and modern processor architectures based on RISC are (generally) more efficient and easier to low level program for. For a good read see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC especially the section RISC and x86. The only reason x86 is still about is because of a dependency of legacy apps/operating systems needing to run.
- barbobot, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/
no compiling necessary it's already done. - coasterfreak212, on 10/10/2007, -3/+9yeah! portable windows 95! That is what i'm talking about! (the sad thing is I'm totaly serious about what i just said)
- Arkz, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6500MHz you could run XP, hell i used to run XP on my old K6-2 450MHz, then again this things frequency might not reflect its computing power, frequency dont mean much these days does it? I mean each 2GHz core in my Windsor X2 3800+ absolutely slaughters the 2.4GHz northwood mobile celeron in my laptop, i find the clock speed fiasco pretty funny, a Celeron M 1.8GHz is considerably more powerful than a 2.4GHz Mobile Celeron
oh and im with you on portable windows, i cant wait to say to someone Just a sec while i download the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica with uTorrent on my Wrist Watch XP to its 64GB flashdrive.... bring on the future! - venom8599, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7It's for the embedded market, where low power usage is what matters. It's not like you're going to be running these in a desktop PC.
- MrTea, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6Or you can always have the manners to use a fork.
- Rikushix, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6I think it would be pretty cheap and easy to build your own mobo with one of those inside, just for browsing the web, no big media or games. That's what that is perfect for.
- ThatsNotPudding, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4I wonder if this would be better for a hardware-based firewall instead of an older, full-size PC.
- superjamie, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5Comparing an x86 low-power-CPU and an ARM low-power-CPU is like comparing apples and oranges.
ARM is great for small embedded devices with specific-built operating systems and interfaces, like mobile phones, PDAs and handheld gaming devices. There are, however, alot of instructions that x86 does which ARM just doesn't do. Yes, you can get Linux to run on it, but an embedded Linux laptop is not going to ship high volumes. Nor are many people interested in recompiling every piece of software they run, just to do every day tasks. The massive popularity of Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva over roll-your-own distros like Arch Linux or Gentoo prove this. ARM is not a feasible solution for desktops.
So let's look at VIA's offering in its' intended environment - embedded x86 networking devices such as routers, firewalls, content engines, as well as the increasingly-popular pre-built media centre PC (you know, those things that look like a VCR, but play your DivX). This product is meant to compete with AMD's Geode line of processors, and it's more efficient in power usage by almost half.
However, in VIA's history, their graphs usually focus more on the things they are good at, and performance has never been one of those things. It's also likely going to be difficult to get a fair comparison to other products on the market, as the form factor these processors have historically been made in (Socket 370) is all but dead, so these are likely solder-only items. I wouldn't be surprised if these processors will be onlly sold in volume to hardware manufacturers, who then design a board which includes the CPU already soldered on. And we all know there's alot more to benchmarking a CPU+motherboard than the processor itself... - geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4Actually it's exactly like comparing a computer architecture to a computer architecture. x86 is basically a legacy architecture. Almost every modern implementation is a RISC machine with a microcode translator bolted on to the front, so no matter what you do to it, it's always going to be slower in every way for a machine that meets in in both hardware parallelism and pipeline depth. The Eden is a single-issue core, so it's *directly* comparable to ARM (where almost all of the cores are single issue).
The ARM chips were designed from the ground up to be extremely power efficient. x86 was designed for CISC implementations and as such no implementation will ever perform as well when emulated by RISC hardware.
So let's look at VIA's offerings. I happen to be an engineer that makes recommendations on this exact subject, multimedia playback in embedded devices. I have never, not once, recommended a Via core. Every client we have, we sit them down and make explicitly sure that their code can build on whatever architecture, so that no matter what we drag them to, the software's not going to be an issue. This is a single issue 500MHz core that uses 1W of power. The ARM1156T2F-S is a single issue core, runnable between 266MHz and 633MHz, uses optimally about 500mW, and is about 1.2 times as fast as the Via core on MPEG decoding without external hardware (the ARM1156T2F-S has both an FPU and an SIMD engine, "NEON"). When we put the boards into deep sleep, the ARM can usually be turned completely off, but even if it can't, it's power draw is 25mW. The power draw of the Eden is 100mW.
I'd even take it as contrary to your remark about there never being a mass-distributed embedded Linux; Ubuntu's already doing an embedded distribution, there's Poky and OpenMoko is going to ship on the Neo1984 phone, there's the LiMo foundation readying a phone platform and there's Intel's MobLin distribution. These are all designed to run on low-profile devices. The foremost and the latter will likely not run on any other architecture but x86 at first ship, but at a later date both are planned to be processor architecture agnostic.
Lastly, I never said ARM is a solution for desktops. ARM is a solution for mobile computing, and the only way we're ever going to get there is if we cut the strings and go there. More and more, what a desktop is has been redefined to what a laptop is; mini PCs are basically embedded machines with a PCI port or two, Apple's iMac is a monolithic embedded machine. More and more we care less to be sitting in front of a desktop and we'd much rather have a computer that goes where we go. That's what ARM is there for. It's both low-power and high performance, and it's hard to believe any modern architecture is going to beat it. The Eden is surely a good attempt at making a more embeddable x86 processor (1W is insane for x86, they haven't reached that since the pre-Pentium days), but it's absolutely appalling by today's standards. - theblooms, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3I was comfortably running Windows 95 on a 486DX/66 with 20 megs of ram and a 540 meg hard drive. This is WAY overkill for Win95.
- radu79, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4It is not that simple. It's not only the application, but the entire OS, and in some cases the endianess issues as well.
Besides, the X86 CPUs are more powerful than the ARMs, they have a ton of useful instructions and optimizations that ARMs don't have (although they do consume more power, of course).
But until we see how powerful this CPU is and what it can't do, it is pointless to argue on which architecture is better. - eddieh, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3I prefer the source version.. http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/13971/via_intros_1-watt_eden_ulv_x86_processor
- khellendros1984, on 10/10/2007, -2/+4Just like many Linux users (including myself) have to already...nothing new there. I'm sure there are ARM distros out there anyhow.
- TheMidnight, on 10/10/2007, -3/+5It says the processor sips watts. I want to sip a watt, and I wonder what it tastes like.
- smackhero, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2for a comparison with popular CPUs, you can check out this comprehensive list on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation
Intel Pentium 75 Mhz consumes 8.0 Watts.
Intel Pentium III 500 MHz uses 28.0 Watts.
Intel Pentium III-E 500 MHz uses 13.2 Watts.
Intel Pentium III 1000 MHz uses 26.1 Watts.
Intel Celeron 500 MHz uses 27.2 Watts.
Intel Celeron II 566 MHz uses 11.9 Watts.
Intel Celeron II 1100 MHz uses 30.8 Watts.
Intel Itanium 2 1.0 GHz uses 100 Watts.
Intel Itanium 2 1.4 GHz uses 91 Watts.
Intel Core Solo U1400 1.2 GHz uses 5.5 Watts.
Intel Core Duo U2500 1.2 GHz uses 9 Watts.
Intel Core 2 Duo U7600 1.20 GHz uses 10 Watts.
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66 GHz uses 65 Watts.
Intel Core 2 Quad QX6700 2.66 GHz uses 130 Watts.
Intel Xeon 2.66 GHz uses 83 Watts.
Intel (5150) Dual Core Xeon 2.66 GHz uses 65 Watts.
AMD (Thunderbird) Athlon 750 MHz uses 43.8 Watts.
AMD (Thunderbird) Athlon 1000 MHz uses 54.3 Watts.
AMD (Barton) Mobile Athlon XP-M 2600+ uses 45 Watts.
AMD (Orleans) Athlon 64 3500+ EE uses 35 Watts.
AMD (Windsor) Athlon 64 X2 5200+ EE uses 65 Watts.
AMD (FX-53) Athlon 64 FX 2400 MHz uses 89 Watts.
AMD (ML-44) Turion 64 2400 MHz uses 35 Watts.
AMD (MT-40) Turion 64 2200 MHz uses 25 Watts.
AMD (TL-64) Turion 64 X2 2200 MHz uses 35 Watts.
VIA (Nehemiah) C3 1000 MHz uses 11.25 Watts.
VIA Eden-N 533 MHz uses 2.5 Watts.
VIA Eden-N 800 MHz uses 5 Watts.
VIA Eden-N 1000 MHz uses 7 Watts.
VIA C7 Esther 1500 MHz 12 Watts.
VIA C7 Esther 2000 MHz 20 Watts.
VIA C7-D Esther 1800 MHz 20 Watts. - geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3Actually, you could run Windows CE, or really, any modern OS you want on it. The NT kernel is rather machine agnostic, it runs on PPC just fine (the 360 has 3 PPC cores after all), there's no reason to believe it wouldn't run on ARM just as well.
- wafflekaffe, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3What's with VIA and christian scripture names? Is the owner some kind of born-again christian? I find it very unappealing in a commercial product, especially something based on technology. I'd be embarrased to own something called "esther" or "Nehemiah".
- geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2It really depends on the architecture. These things only issue a single instruction a clock, where theoretically a Core 2 could retire /4/, and an A64 could do 3. But, you could aggregate 64 of these things and still only be at 64W, whereas 4 Core 2s would put you at 200W+. If you had a task that was seriously embarassingly parallel, the 64 machines would be faster. But in reality, if you had a task like that, you'd buy 4 cheapish FPGAs and clock them at 100MHz for a cost of ~30W and outperform everything else out there.
The idea of putting 16 of those cores on one board is just plain ridiculous. - msgyrd, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Depends on your setup and geographical location (colder climates may welcome to extra heat). On top of that, throwing away 9 computers isn't always financially sound. The resell market for older computers is all but dead for anything but laptops, meaning you'd have to consider how much it's costing you in the long term to run 9 computers vs. the cost of 2 new blade servers and their running costs. You also have to consider the purpose of those computers. A blade server doesn't make a good PVR system. A blade server doesn't make a good desktop either. It won't replace the laptops. Kids don't want to run thin clients off a server either, they want to play games.
Blade servers are a great business decision, but they have little purpose in a household. - PhonicUK, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Lowest spec I ever got to the Win95 desktop on was a 12mhz i386 with 12 meg of ram (8+4) and a 50mb HDD, With a little work windows 95 OSR2 can be squeezed into a little under 5mb w/o zipping.
- acceptab1euname, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Actually, I would very much like my next new PC to be a super-low-power consumption machine. I currently have a ~4 year old AthlonXP 2600-based system with tons of RAM that still runs beautifully and does precisely what I want it to do, but I know it's not going to last forever. In addition, it takes up a good deal of power and generates a nice amount of heat while being only slightly noisy.
Ideally, I'd like to have an 'out of sight, out of mind' sort of PC that I could run all the time and not even notice - I want it to sit there and be nearly entirely silent and cool-running. I work too much to play videogames anymore, and so I don't need a massive videocard or anything else like that, just lots of storage space and a CPU that'll get things done quickly.
Any thoughts/recommendations? - msgyrd, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Product code names. I don't know how they choose them, but it certainly wouldn't embarrass me. Most consumers never see the code names anyways, even fewer would see Via's codenames in embedded products. The fact that the chip in my laptop is codenamed "Merom" or "Barton" has little significance on anything.
- Langford, on 10/10/2007, -4/+5Could this be developed into multi processors systems? 500MHz doesn't sound like much, until you have 16 of them.
- TheMidnight, on 10/10/2007, -3/+4Besides, if you start running 16 1-watt 500 MHz processors, you might as well run 4 2 GHz processors that probably take up a little more energy to run but much less to produce the chips and motherboards for.
- geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1ARM13 is the Cortex series (offically ARM 7 but *shrug*).
- dallasjfreeman, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2this is pretty awesome, as a user with 9 computers at home, I'm starting to re-think about my carbon footprint - why don't they target multi-cpu motherboards with this? 4 (2ghz in total) of these will use less power then a 1.5ghz on it's own
i know you don't get 2ghz in total with multi-cpu but i'm comparing with a 1.5ghz - dcmjzero, on 10/10/2007, -2/+3ok, but this would only work with a *nix. and even then you would have to specially compile every piece of software.
- smex, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1like this one? http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops/htc-shift-is-the-umpc-for-umpc-haters-246965.php
- DontGiveADamn, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1People may wonder why this is necessary. I run a home server that is on 24/7. It is used to serve up web pages, give me access to my files when I'm not at home, and runs Bittorrent. It uses a mini-itx motherboard that runs at 533mhz with a laptop hard drive. No noise since it has no fans. It only uses 14 watts.
- msgyrd, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2In a household of 4 computer users, I could imagine 9 computers. Right now it's just me and my wife and we have 4, one laptop and one desktop each. When I can afford it, I'm going to build a PVR computer for the TV. That's 5 for two people, and that's just our current computers. Add in two teenage kids that each want their own desktop or laptop and you easily have 7-9 in a modern household.
Of course, I've been a computer user for some time now. Getting rid of old desktops is a pain. Nobody really buys them or pays anything worthwhile for them, and they can still serve useful purposes when they become secondary machines. While we only have 4 computers right now, before we moved this summer and got rid of a lot of things, we had 7 ...for 2 people. I certainly don't "need" 7 running at once, but it's easy to accumulate them over time. - geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Eh, the target price for these is actually about $50; you can buy a whole Eden board complete with peripherals for about $100, and build a whole computer around one for about $300. It'll run roughly the speed of a 1999 500MHz Celeron box, but hey, if that's all you need, why not? The whole machine itself would probably top out at 10W power draw.
- smackhero, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1the C7 processor is actually a very impressive piece of technology with a number of key advantages over Intel or AMD processors. for example, the C7 chip has an enhanced power saving feature allowing it to switch between 2 PPLs, one set at a high clock speed and the other at a low clock speed, to adjust the processor speed in a single CPU cycle. the C7 also supports hardware SHA-1 and SHA-256 hashing, hardware based "Montgomery Multiplier" supporting key sizes up to 32K for public key cryptography, and an advanced hardware random number generator.
the C7 also features enhanced digital media performance with support for SSE2 and SSE3 multimedia instructions and a full-speed FPU. and all VIA C-Series mobile chipsets integrate hardware MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoding acceleration. these features, coupled with their low power-consumption and low thermal profile design make the C7 a very desirable chip for PVR boxes or digital media centers.
in fact, i've been considering building a C7 nano-ATX box for use as a PVR/media center since the cooling requirements are minimal and you could probably get by with just passive cooling, meaning fan noises. but with their recent announcement of a Pico-ITX motherboard--10 x 7.2 cm (3.9 in x 2.8 in)--running a 1GHz C7 chip, i'm inclined to hold off on the project a while longer. - DarkPenguin, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Just get a large passive (fanless) heatsink for your processor and a passively cooled PSU - Thermaltake has a few.
I don't know how hot 2600s run, but you could probably undervolt/clock it to keep it cooler. - acceptab1euname, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2(Trying to reply to misterS' comment, but digg won't let me)
I'm one of the people who came over to digg from slashdot...since then digg's gone way down in article and comment (and website coding) quality. So I'm wondering, where's the new 'digg'? Where can a person go for good tech news and intelligent commentary?
"Your session has expired, please refresh the page before commenting."
Between that stupid *$&#ing message (I've refreshed the story 5 times now and still can't post my reply where I want to) and the agonizingly slow page load times - I love how mozilla freaks out and grabs 99% of the CPU each and every time - it's like digg's almost *trying* to drive people off. - DarkPenguin, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1WTF? Why is everyone digging down bonexaw? Has anyone here taken physics?
- msgyrd, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1That depends really. For the guy up a few comments, with 9 computers, you could make one of them the firewall / print server/ file server for the other 8, handle DHCP for the network, monitor household traffic, host web traffic/ssh connections etc. Stuff a Linksys router doesn't do. I see nothing wrong with using a full PC for a firewall as long as it's doing other things also.
- unikuser, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1FYI Its not kernel which is stopping people from migrating to new archs. It is those f**ng applications. How will you make that win32,mfc, win16 gui apps and those old dos apps to run on some foreign architecture?
- GawtMilk, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1Electrical Big Gulp
- harshbarj, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1multiprocessor dose not work that way. You still have a 500mhz system, just certain apps will run faster with multiprocessors.
You can't really compare the two as in many cases the 1.5ghz will outperform your quad 500mhz system (as even now few things are muti-threaded). - RegalGSX, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0huhuhuhuh, he said penetration.
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