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Via Unveils 1-Watt x86 CPU
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Aug 24, 2007 04:07 AM
from the new-and-improved dept.
from the new-and-improved dept.
DeviceGuru writes "Taiwanese chip and board vendor Via Technologies has introduced a new ultra-low voltage (ULV) processor aimed at industrial, commercial, and ultra-mobile applications. Touted as the world's most power-efficient x86-compatible CPU, the 500MHz 'Eden ULV 500' processor debuted at an Embedded Systems Conference in Taipei this week. Via says its chip draws a minimum of 0.1 Watts, when idle, and a maximum of 1 Watt, making it a great candidate for consumer electronics devices such as UMPCs, PVRs, and such."
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laptop anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
How does it compare? (Score:5, Interesting)
The article doesn't say what socket and interface the chip uses. Are they still on Socket 370?
Parent
Re:How does it compare? (Score:5, Informative)
How does this chip compare in performance per watt against ARM, PowerPC and the like?
Pathetically badly. Most modern low power ARM variants are in the range 0.3-0.5mW/MHz. At 500MHz you'd see them chewing up about 150-250mW. Last I checked the Via x86 chips were single issue, so it's not too unfair to compare an ARM11 (or similar) against them. Quite frankly an ARM11 will outperform the Via chip and run lower power.
The idle power figure is a joke. I can't recall the last time I used an ARM chip that idled at 100mW. More like 1-10mW. Still, it's nice to see an x86 chip get into sub-watt territory.
Of course, ARM doesn't run native x86... and that's pretty much the only reason there's such a large market for these Via x86 chips. It's also the reason you never see them in deeply embedded systems where people don't really care so much about what ISA you're running.
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Re:How does it compare? (Score:5, Interesting)
When i was building a linux based PVR, x86 compatibilty was not a deciding factor *. What i wanted was a cheap fanless board that could playback mpeg2 and divx, with a PCI slot for a tuner card, TV-Out, and SATA.
When i was looking there were hundreds of Via C3/C7 based boards from heaps of manufactures, with countless different options. There were one or two ARM and PPC boards, even one with a transmetta CPU, but they didn't have TV-Out, or they had TV-Out but no USB or PCI.
I would have loved to go with another architecture but the market for retail consumers just isn't there.
* Actually, now i've said that i imagine compatibilty of the tuner drivers with non-x86 could be an issue.
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Re:How does it compare? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ex. Take an Barton core Athlon and compare it with a 1st Gen P4, running both at the same clock speed. That Barton will significantly outperform the P4, even with the same Mhz. Conversely, thake a Core2 Duo and an Athlon64 X2 of the same clock speed - the Core2 Duo will wipe the floor with the Athlon64 X2.
Mhz only means something when the processors are of the same line. Different lines in an arch can drastically modify the CPUs relative performance by Mhz, varying app to app, and changing the arch completely will destroy most comparisons.
Another example, would be to compare a 500Mhz EV6 Alpha to a 1Ghz Athlon - There are many tasks at which that Alpha will pretty much destroy the Athlon in terms of performance, even at half the clock speed.
So, what you want is power:performance-at-desired-tasks ratios, it's more complex, but it's not useless (and in some cases, counterproductive/counter intuitive)
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Re:How does it compare? (Score:5, Informative)
Your premise is correct that it is an apples to oranges comparison, but not really for the reasons you describe.
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Re:How does it compare? (Score:4, Insightful)
RISC is an instruction set thing, with the caveat that RISC instruction sets lend themselves to pipelined instruction execution as a by product.
Yes, modern x86 processors have RISC like microcode implemented using pipelined cores, but the x86 -> microcode converter is extra logic RISC processors just don't need.
There is no way you can implement an x86 chip in the same number of transistors as a RISC chip like ARM or MIPS, hence this VIA chip having considerably more power draw.
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Re:laptop anyone (Score:5, Interesting)
A really low-power Dothan or single-core Yonah will sure draw a few multiples of this beast, but they will do so while giving much better performance.
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Not entirely sure why we specifically need x86 for embedded stuff like PVRs though... It's not like you're having to run something Windows on it, which is tied to specific architectures.
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For a user-oriented workstation, true. Even with the Via C7, a single HDD (at spin-up, anyway) could consume more than the CPU.
I think, though, these things mostly don't go into actual desktop machines. They go into car audio solutions (with a 4x20 non-backlit LCD or even VFD), or routers (headless and with CF or USB storage) or various low-demand servers (also headless
Re:laptop anyone (Score:5, Informative)
I have used every single Via CPU from the original Eden 533 up to 1.5GHz C7 and IMO the C3-C5 spec Edens are just about useful for a dedicated appliances, small firewalls, small specialised servers and such. They do not have enough grunt for a laptop. The fact that most of them have are shipped bundled with relatively weak video does not really help either. Even the mpeg support on some motherboards cannot really help. Xterm is probably the most you can do with them as far as clients are concerned. Still better than similarly clocked Crusoe though (now that is a drag of all drags).
C7 is a completely different beast. This is probably the best CPU for a corporate laptop out there at the moment. A laptop is worthless without a "link to the mothership". Intel Core and AMD have to use CPU resource to do all of the encryption and decryption. This may amount to 30-40% of your CPU on a 54G wireless lan. Compared to that Via C7 has hardware AES acceleration so you can actually protect your traffic properly while using less than 1% of your CPU. It also has enough grunt to run most common road warrior apps at acceptable speeds. It is a pity it is not available as a laptop choice anywhere outside the far east.
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Re:laptop anyone (Score:4, Informative)
The reason is that at least as of the versions present in major distros openssh does not for some reason support openssl engines. AES (and RSA in latest Via CPUs) is done using an openssl engine which has to be initialised and loaded. This can be done for OpenVPN, Apache, Pound and nearly any other piece of software using OpenSSL, but not OpenSSH. For some reason Theo's people in their infinite wisdom left that part out (it is trivial). There was a patch, dunno if it has made it into the main tree.
As far as non-OpenSSL software is concerned, the kernel itself can use the hardware AES for filesystems and IPSEC. I have run it for quite a while for both OpenVPN and IPSEC. It can run around a Dual Xeon in circles. I would expect it to have the same killer performance for encryption of filesystems and encrypted backups as well. In fact this is possibly the only CPU on the market at the moment where having all of your data encrypted is a realistic proposition. The rest will choke on it and crawl like a 486.
There is also further improvement from having true on-CPU hardware RNG which all programs in need of good random numbers can use as it is implemented at kernel level.
Probably the highest praise to it is the fact that most of these features have now started showing up on Intel roadmap documents for the future x86 CPUs destined for the embedded market. It is the Athlon history repeating. When someone else is doing something right Intel copies it, claims innovation and launches a marketing salvo trying to lie that "they have been doing it all along".
Parent
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Sudoku?
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Would you honestly want only 500Mhz in your laptop? But it would be great if handheld devices could have this much power though, preferably on something like a mini sized tablet (or an over-sized iPhone).
I'm not sure MHz are a very good absolute measurement of the processing capabilities of this thing...
But it could make a very decent laptop. I used to have a Vaio with a Pentium II 400 (PictureBook) that was quite nice. Not the kind of thing you'd run Vista on but with XFCE it ran like a charm despite having an abysmal battery life.
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Centrino as well as any Core derived notebook under Winhoze uses voltage and frequency scaling. It will ramp up to its spec-ed frequency only when pushed really hard and in some laptops only when on AC power. If you want to actually have reasonable battery performance on Linux you end up doing the same using the cpufreq susbsystem. Example from a Core Duo on which I am typing this post:
model name :
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(1) Yes. Take a look at 2.5" drives used in laptops, for example. You could also use flash instead of an actual disk. Having done that myself, I must give you a word of warning: don't do flash+usb on Linux. It will hang because of I/O errors every few days. I believe this is due to there being a hardcoded limit on the number of writ
holy cow! and their 1.5GHz is only 7.5W (Score:5, Interesting)
20-30W. With HDD, DVD, encoder card etc, it draws 80W on start,
and somewhere between 30-60W when running.
Take 10-20W off my figures by using their 1.5GHz ULV
and you get potentially more processing power at less
than 50W!
I know that VIA chips are pretty feeble (i.e. their 1.5GHz
chip is probably closer to a 1GHz intel chip), but with an
encoder card (dual actually) I can be recording two
channels with the CPU at 10%. Given their mobos have
mpeg decoders on board, I can add watching a DVD or TV
for another 30-40% CPU time.
The only thing is ad-skipping and re-encoding are pretty
slow.
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The VIA epia platforms like the one you have weren't that great. I had their 600mhz chip and ITX board and on the meter it was still drawing about 40 watts idle at the plug. The power supply probably wasn't the greatest but still I had higher hopes. That was only the ITX board plus a normal 3.5" 7200rpm hard drive. The cpu was barely enough for most tasks and some tasks you didn't even want to do. It is probably much better with your cpu but you're still drawing more power than necessary.
As a comparison
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Stop spreading bullshit FUD. The MPEG2 decoder hardware has been supported for years now in open source. My MythTV frontend, a Via EPIA M10000 running at 1 GHz uses the MPEG2 decoding hardware when playing back video saved from my backend's Hauppauge PVR 250 hardware mpeg2 encoders just fine with very little CPU usage. The only problems arise when you try playing DivX or MPEG4 streams.
Why not make 64 of these on a single chip? (Score:2, Interesting)
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IOW, I'd take a Core2 quad core over 64 Vias anyday.
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Concurrency is perhaps the biggest problem to modern day CS.
If we could figure out how to use all those cores effectively, it would be awesome. Until then, its of dubius as a archaeticture
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Cool! (Score:3, Interesting)
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Sounds like an overclocker's dream (Score:2)
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Oh, I don't doubt performance will be crap. It's just curiosity about how far you could push something that would be just fine with a heatsink, if it needs it at all.
It seems that it takes liquid nitrogen to really squeeze out everything possible out of a normal Intel/AMD, but that can't be kept up for very long, and is very expensive to try.
PVRs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Redundand? (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux and Windows CE (or whatever they call it today) run just fine on ARM and similar. Will a low-power x86 compete performance-wise with a low-power RISK architecture?
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I agree though, this
I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on power (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po (Score:2)
Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po (Score:2)
Yes, some people want to buy a video card that requires some amps to play the current games. Some people want to buy a car that performs well. (I'm not talking about SUVs or huge waste hogs)
Everyone pays for the power they consume, be it gasoline or electricity. Who cares?
Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Who cares? People are generally selfish and sometimes you must do things that benefit people as a whole instead of individuals. If slapping a tax on the most energy consuming devices in some category causes people to buy the more efficient ones, that is a benefit to every one. If you still want to buy that device despite the tax then nobody is stopping you. But I guarantee that for everyone who does than many more will choose one which doesn't.
It does not mean either that you're getting a crappier machine as a result. While there is a relationship between CPU / GPU performance and power, I doubt it is a 1:1 mapping. Some processors and GPUs are going to deliver more operations per watt than others. Companies and consumers should be encouraged to favour the more efficient designs over the less efficient designs and a tax for the worst offenders in any class is one way of going about that.
Parent
Power rating (Score:3, Interesting)
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In Denmark, a sizeable chunk of the total car park are small or family cars with engines in the 1.3-2.0L range. Sporty cars (Alfa Romeo et al, not Ferrari) are probably in the 2-3L range, no more. Of course the SUV-style cars will have way bigger engines (but I suspect that's more to help push the ego rather than the car).
A relevant tidbit: we pay ~7$ per gallon of petrol.
I drive a VW station wagon. It's 4 cy
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Get a Diesel e
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With the relatively low cost and high availability of computing speed nowadays, the green5
On a somewhat related note (Score:3, Informative)
The release of Vista suggests that we need more and more powerful systems to do our work, but the irony, at least for me, is that I keep buying more of the little guys. Being able to use fanless cases and/or flash drives is a definite selling point, but there's a surprising amount of processing power available in such products and their uses are as limitless as your own imagination. Besides, hacking those ubiquitous blue boxes can never be as satisfying as building your own.
The VIA units I own could be described as underpowered, but having onboard MPEG decoders, for example, can make up for the shortcomings.
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Can you mount the board in a regular ATX case?
Can it be hooked up to a regular ATX PSU?
Who is Soekris? Do you work for them? What's the warranty like?
Does it run Linux? I mean really. lspci output?
Is there video out? How do you 'interact'? COM port?
Seems interesting, but not enough to trawl the website!
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So like. . an intel 2 duo that takes a room and miles of cable?
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