The Amazing Integrated Microprocessor 78
An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "SiByte Inc.
has
announced the
Mercurian
processor SB-1250, a single chip
containing two MIPS64 CPU
capable of running up to 1GHz, plus a 512kByte L2 Cache,
PCI, gigabit ethernet (3) and serial (2) interfaces.
The whole chip consumes
a mere 10 watts with both processors and all interfaces
running at full speed. While it is targeted at networking and communications systems,
wouldn't you like to have a notebook allowing to carry with you
that much processing
power? The chip will be able in volume mid next year, and the data
sheet states, they will provide support for porting NetBSD
and Linux to it." Sure it's vapor, but it sounds pretty impressive.
Re:yeah, and what about itanium? (Score:1)
Re:Shared Cache not all bad (Score:1)
BTW:- This chip or something similar it is the future of computing. Very cool indeed.
Re:fskin' astroturfer - piss off (Score:1)
As for the list of processors and lies listed, here's a more accurate one.
Re:component failures? (Score:1)
Which would be a bad thing.
Re:What about porting Windows? (Score:1)
not holding my breath wrt Linux support (Score:2)
This is becase where the ia32 archetecture has a common and well-documented SMP method, APIC, Mips does not. Each vendor seems to do their own proprietary thing.
This would definately be cool but I'll believe it when i see it.
Re:fskin' astroturfer - piss off (Score:1)
RS6000 is a whole family of workstations/servers from IBM - not a processor architecture.
(RS6000 systems run on POWER, POWER2, PowerPC, and POWER3 cpus.)
HP's PA-RISC is missing, IBM's RT, Motorola 88k, NS32K, SH3/SH4, Intel i960 (not sure about that)...
Re:Back to the 80's (Score:1)
Internet Appliance is a ratehr enigmatic term. Would you want the Apple Cube to be put into the same class as, say, WebTV? Not I. The Cube is an impressive. WebTV.. No. On another note, while it would be nice to see the Apple to use a custom Athlon (without the x86 translation) rumour hold true, Apple really just has to threaten to take their business elsewhere and Motorola will likely shape up.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:1)
always wondered can 2, or more, transmeta chips work in smp?
Doubtful; the microprocessors themselves have an integrated northbridge which would make this difficult.
Performance? (Score:1)
Could it equal or surpass the king of the hill
Alphas EV67?
That would be a wild setup for Seti units in so.
but still no word on the setup prolly vaporware like so many things now days.
Re:Has anybody told SGI? (Score:1)
My 175MHz R10000 (1MB L2 cache) manages to crunch a SETI@Home packet in only 9 hours. I like my Indigo2
Since MIPS does a lot per clock, one can only imagine the performance of such a core clocked at 1 GHz.
Re:Roman Numeral Leet speak? (Score:1)
Leave it. It's quite original, funny, and doesn't mentions Signal 11 or Jon Katz. That's rare here on Slashdot!
Re:Target (Score:1)
Then Microsoft stepped in....
all the people in the house say "ho!" (Score:1)
Re:Has anybody told SGI? (Score:2)
My 175MHz R10000 (1MB L2 cache) manages to crunch a SETI@Home packet in only 9 hours.
My celeron 450 will crunch a seti packet in about 8 1/2 hrs, so they are roughly equivalent with this test even though the mips is running at less than 1/2 the clock speed. I would certainly like to see SGIs with 1GHz chips. I certainly couldn't afford to buy one, but I can always dream.
Who uses serial ports anymore? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Has anybody told SGI? (Score:1)
Since we're doing spelling flames... (Score:1)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Re:Target (Score:2)
Yep, these "targets" have been making me chuckle for years. The 386 was targeted for servers. All I could think of at the time was that I wanted one to replace the 8086 on my desk at work. Fuck servers! I wanna compile/link faster!
Is there any reason someone wouldn't want to use this new processor for other miscellaneous purposes? Typically, only downside to these "fringe" processors is that they don't run legacy x86 stuff, but if you run an OS like Linux or *BSD where you have the source to almost everything anyway, then binary compatability doesn't matter nearly as much, as long as you have a compiler. Once you get away from the need for binary compatability, you have the luxury of getting to focus on performance issues, so the marketroids' claims about the "target" may be completely irrelevant.
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Re:Target (Score:2)
Re:Able to what? (Score:1)
A trend is starting (Score:1)
Now let's take this a step further...
Eventually, we're going to see the limit on how far we can push a single processor, and the only real logical direction to go until we find the next best thing (light based computers?), multiprocessor systems will become the norm. and now that everyone has finnaly cought on to multi-core chips... this may actually become an affordable (affordable for the average joe computer user...) reality. ibm had the right idea with the mutli core g4 idea.. but that has yet to materialize.
Re:Time to buy (Score:2)
Re:component failures? (Score:1)
It's for performance/simplicity, not for fault tolerance. If you want fault tolerance, then build a computer that contains several of these multi-CPU chips.
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Re:Back to the 80's (Score:1)
Re:Time to buy (Score:1)
As it looks, this is a hot chip and if 1/2 of the claims on the "data sheet" come true it will be a nice tool. However, that "data sheet" isn't much yet. A real data sheet for this chip should push 800 pages.
Big time vaporware at this time.
Another one (Score:2)
But, in my opinion, the company is poorly run. All my inquiries about their products have been completely unanswered. I would definitely not purchase from them unless they made an extreme turnaround.
Non x86 CPU's still supported by MS (Score:1)
Microsoft still supports these non-Intel CPUs.
Granted, this is for WinCE. See the full list here. [microsoft.com]
regards,
-l
have a day,
-l
Re:Able to what? (Score:1)
Notebook?! (Score:1)
The package is all wrong for the PC market as well, an 860 BGA? Probably requires 12-16 layer PCB just to breakout all the rows. But, that's a common stack for networking...
It'll make a real nice embedded web cache controller (or content-switch, or whatever the term-du-jour is).
And those who claim vapor on it -- I suspect this part is vapor, but I would bet dollars-to-donuts that they already have a single-CPU test chip in their lab without all the other cool goodies in this version. TSMC 0.15 micron process has been stable for a little while now, so the test chip could even be in the same process.
Re:Q3 Arena on a router? (Score:2)
? shoot NORTH
you missed
? shoot NE
hit!
? use BFG
you are now using the Big F-ing Gun
? shoot NE
you have killed the llamas.
Re:What about porting Windows? (Score:2)
The theory is that the OS does not handle any calls to hardware services itself at - it asks the HAL. The HAL in NT4 was only a few Mb of compiled code that picks up this call, interprets it for the "local" architecture, and then passes it on down. This means that NT can be ported by re-wrting just the HAL itself. Or at least in theory. I'm not an MS code-monkey, but my friends who are tell me there are other "areas" that need to b re-written for the OS to be ported, but even then it shouldn't be more than about 20Mb of compiled code.
In actual fact, it's the one aspect of NT that I really like. There are times I wish a free OS would implement such a system (I think NetBSD uses a similar principle in that the amount of core code to port is reduced), because then we could basically get a bunch of free OSes running on loads of hardware. FreeBSD on a Psion 5 would rock my world to say the least. OpenBSD on a Palm V. Linux on a Sun Enterprise 10000. NetBSD on an AS/400. You get the idea.
Anyway, as I was saying. I always thought that the HAL would slow things down massively, but apparently the performance hit is minimal. I'm sure somebody else will have more info on this.
Re:How about 128 32-bit cores on a single die? (Score:1)
Re:First spelling error (Score:1)
Kent
Re:First spelling error (Score:1)
Time to buy (Score:2)
Cisco IOS has run on MIPS32 for ages, I see no problems for them making it run on MIPS64.
This just looks like the next CPU for a cisco line card. If foundry, intel, juniper or any of the other sharks in the pond will not eat it first.
That is if this is not vapourware.
Target (Score:3)
Reminds me of endless blurbs in PC Magazine about what things are "targetted for..."
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Finally... (Score:1)
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
Re:First spelling error (Score:1)
TWW
component failures? (Score:2)
If the processor goes, everything goes.
Mid next year? (Score:1)
But what they're saying is that it'll be released mid next year. Will it still be impressive then?
I don't really think so. It'll just be another processor like all the others.
Carrying water to the ocean is what i'd call it.
Re:okay, okay, grammar error, stop flaming. (Score:1)
Jeremy
Heck, give me one for my desktop. :-) (Score:3)
Bus speed runs at half of the speed of the processor, so it's 500 Mhz. (The key to Mercurian's unique architecture is its intelligent, high-performance MP design built around a fast, on-chip internal bus called the ZBbusTM. The ZBbus, which runs at half the CPU core clock with a data width of 256 bits (one cache line), connects all the major blocks of the processor including the CPU cores, cache memory, and I/O.)
The chips work in conjunction with each other, not against each other or in a master/slave relationship. That's got to help matters as well.
The only thing I can squawk about is the L2 cache being shared by both processors. I suppose this means you can claim 512 L2 cache for each processor, but what if they are both working in completely different memory spaces; would that effectively drop to 256k cache? Does it matter?
And the PCI bus looks to be nice; claiming 400 Mhz clock with 6.4Gb/second; looks to be utilizing a trick similar to AMDs 200 Mhz FSB.
This chip just goes to show you what you can or could do by leaving the x86 architecture behind. (Backward compatibility, backward compatibility, backwar Shuddup!)
Please pass the FUD.. :-)
-- Talonius
Off-topic: What would the world be like without a past and legacies? Where would we be? What dreams and myths would we come up with, in today's day and age? Something fun to think on.
Re:Time to buy (Score:2)
How about 128 32-bit cores on a single die? (Score:3)
"German startup Pact GmbH will attempt to leapfrog the growing field of highly parallel processors targeting communications when it rolls out a complex 30-million-transistor CPU that integrates 128 thirty-two-bit processors at this week's Microprocessor Forum."
Probably too expensive (Score:1)
Transmeta doesn't design systems; it's up to other companies to decide what to do with their chips. Those stereo component MP3 players will probably be using Cirrus Logic chips that are cheaper than Crusoes because they use a much slower ARM core.
Re:Roman Numeral Leet speak? (Score:1)
Thanks.
And glad you saw it. I started to change it yesterday, but didn't get around to it. I guess I'll leave it a while if people are still noticing.
--
Give me a candidate who speaks out against the war on drugs.
No compiler (Score:1)
Re:What about porting Windows? (Score:1)
Re:What about porting Windows? (Score:2)
________________________________________
fskin' astroturfer - piss off (Score:1)
Re:fskin' astroturfer - piss off (Score:1)
should read
1. x86 - for any x
There are Linux ports that run on the 8086/8088/80286/V20, and 80386 is still the default CPU.
Also add to the list:
17. Z80
Re:What about porting Windows? (Score:1)
Q3 Arena on a router? (Score:1)
+ network latency would likely be lowered by an order of magnitude.
- I can't imagine frame rates being very good.
An accomplished Quake god in text mode Quake on a router might very well be someone to fear.
regards,
-l
have a day,
-l
Re:Time to buy (Score:1)
Re:component failures? (Score:1)
I'm sure this thing could run for 30 years if treated properly without a hitch... solid state technology, we love you! :)
Re:Has anybody told SGI? (Score:1)
not really vapour (Score:2)
i guess it's okay to dream about logging onto procewatch and seeing quad consumer grade cpu ATX mobos for this beast someday, even if the possibility is remote.
SB-1 Core (Score:2)
Of course this assumes that everything goes well. High frequency/low power stuff at Very Deep Sub Micron (VDSM) can run into a lot of problems during tapeout (crosstalk, timing, DRC violations, buggs in the back end tools). Still, that core is sweet.
Re:not holding my breath wrt Linux support (Score:1)
What might be a more interesting question is can you mix cards and CPUs of different frequencies and even architectures. For example, if there is enough critical mass opt-in for say the RapidIO standard [rapidio.org] (a big if), then if CPUs/kernels (not just Linux) standardise on compatible IPC mechanisms and shared data structures/objects, you can possibly have a system where you only upgrade the CPU rather than throwing out the whole machine every 2-3 years. Due to its complexity and human intensive nature, software changes more slowly than hardware where you can just ramp up the shrink process. There are already some hints of this with the HandSpring module, where you retain your familiar interface but just up the capabilities according to your preference. However, I suspect to do this properly with Linux may require some thought into how the ELF object code format can support mupport multiple systems. [handspring.com]
Perhaps something to discuss at that new 64bit unix [technocrat.net] mailing list set up recently. LL
Sure its vapor, but it sounds pretty impressive... (Score:4)
Re:okay, okay, grammar error, stop flaming. (Score:1)
Re:Time to buy (Score:1)
What about porting Windows? (Score:1)
Oh wait... I forgot. Though shalt have one processor, x86.
Couldn't resist a little dig there. I'm still pissed that there are no strong-arm laptops because Microsoft can't get their shit together and write portable code :P After-all, "It doesn't run Windows so why build one?"
"No judge, we do not have an adverse effect on the industry. Just look at McAffee... they get to charge $16K a pop to plug up our Outlook holes. That's industry growth, by golly!"
OK, I'm ranting... :P
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
Re:First spelling error (Score:1)
Nah. If they started proofreading their articles we'd start saying they were pretentious gits, and Slashdot would loose that common, homey touch that makes it so popular.
--
Give me a candidate who speaks out against the war on drugs.
Microcontollers (Score:1)
Re:Time to buy (Score:3)
Shared Cache not all bad (Score:2)
If course whether this is good or bad depends on the problem.
Back to the 80's (Score:1)
Welcome back to the days of CoCos, Commies, Amigas and Macs. We have a number of tiny-ish companies with great ideas that will unfortunatly go the way of the Amiga. IBM had more money at the time and was able to better market an inferior machine. These devices, as cool as they are, will not progress to a respectable level (though this new one does actually have SOME promise, even if it is vapour). My question is how the hell they can do it with a mere 10 watts? WOW! Now if only there was a way to directly address the risc-esque core of the intel and amd chips, while still being able to address the translation units to keep backwards compatability. That would be something to shoot for as the translation (and the units that facilitate that) eat up ALOT of juice and produce ALOT of heat.
Re:Roman Numeral Leet speak? (Score:1)
Uhh, "Nero 1337 5kr1p7 k1dd13 est."
Nice one! Erm, I mean two! (Score:1)
No pr0n, just the chip.
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Re:Time to buy (Score:1)
wow
Re:What about porting Windows? (Score:1)
Re:component failures? (Score:2)
Ugh, an omen. (Score:1)
Re:What about porting Windows? (Score:2)
...and that would make it different how? (Score:1)