Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Feb 2007 21:56 UTC
Remember PA Semi? The company has just released, as promised, its first chipset. "They are full 64-bit PPC, support virtualisation, and would do Alitvec but that name is copyrighted by Freescale. Instead they do 'VMA'. The three parts run at a max wattage of 25, 15 and 10W for the 2.0, 1.5 and 1.0GHz parts respectively, with typical wattage listed at 13, 8 and 6W. The individual cores are said to have a 7W max and 4W typical power consumption at 2.0GHz." PA Semi was one of the prime reasons why Ars's John 'Hannibal' Stokes doubted Apple's reasoning for the switch to Intel.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
It's just too hard to compete with Intel in the larger parts of the mobile space (12"+ laptops). AMD, who has been focusing on the x86 space for a couple of decades, is first starting to come out with parts that make sense next to Intel's mobile offerings.
But even they don't go toe-to-toe with Intel in price/performance yet, and Intel is doing a good job at staying a year ahead in process technology. If AMD can't quite get there with IBM and Chartered backing them up, then PA isn't going to make headway in the laptop market.
They know this. That's why I'm inclined to agree with Rayiner. There's a high-volume market out there that will soon dwarf the traditional PC market. It comprises increasingly capable ultra-mobile gadgets as well as larger embedded applications in the datacenter.
Imagine the datacenter in 10-15 years, composed of massive general-purpose compute nodes (virtualized mainframes running Linux) and dedicated I/O paths served by racks of re-provisionable controllers based on low-power integrated systems (probably running Linux). PA Semi probably wants to become the Cisco of enterprise I/O offloading.