"At the Research@Intel day last week, Intel had a huge array of technologies and active research initiatives on display for press and analysts. As I toured the company's Santa Clara offices, I was able to piece together a few major themes and directions by stepping back and looking at the places where Intel is currently focusing its forward-looking research. In my next few articles, starting with this one, I'll take an in-depth look at each of these themes and at what it tells us about where computing is headed in the next decade."
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Member since:2006-04-20
Just goes to show what a dead end the x86 architecture is - it has only survived due to accidents of history and ubiquity. There are vastly superior processor technologies available now, yet chances are they will be adopted slowly simply because of the x86 market dominance. The only way I see these chips taking off is if Microsoft port Windows to it (technically shouldn't be too hard, as Windows CE runs on MIPS architecture).
Imagine silent, passively cooled PCs that take up a fraction of the space of current PCs, and use a fraction of the power... One can only hope someone with the wherewithal steps up to the plate and starts marketing the bejesus out of these CPUs
Edited 2007-07-01 00:24
Member since:2006-07-28
No it doesn't. x86 is nothing but an instruction set. The architecture has changed many, many times. I can see no major advantage in terms of power consumption between MIPS and x86 instruction sets (indeed, x86 tends to be more compact thus requiring less bus cycles for program access, this is traded off against a smaller number of internal registers which means more external data access is required... chickens and eggs).
Just as a point of comparison the Pentium M 733 ULV requires maximally 5 watts to run at 1.1Ghz. This chip is fast, very fast.
Member since:
2007-01-27
I have been running and compiling Slackware for the low-power, high-speed MIPS-compatible Loongson processor over the last two months. It consumes 4W at 700 MHz. Clock for clock it's competitive with Intel and AMD processors with a dramatic decrease in power consumption.
Several companies are already creating and selling systems based on this processor such as Lemote with their Fu Long and Sinomaniac with their laptops.
The next version (Loongson 2F), that is due in a few months, will be even faster, running from 1 to 1.2 GHz at 2W power consumption. Loongson 3 that is to come in 2008 will have 16 cores, making it much more attractive than any multicore Intel/AMD processor, except where absolute single-threaded performance counts.
AMCC will launch a dual-core 2 GHz PowerPC processor at the end of the year that will only consume 2.5 per core. It's based on Intrinsity's Fast14 technology that they had already implemented for MIPS.
I honestly don't know what Intel and AMD are doing at the moment pushing their power-hungry processors when they could cut down on power consumption by 90% if they really wanted to.
Edited 2007-06-30 12:32 UTC