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NVIDIA Enters the Mobile CPU Market
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jun 03, 2008 09:32 PM
from the or-should-we-say-mobile-gpu dept.
from the or-should-we-say-mobile-gpu dept.
Vigile writes "NVIDIA just announced the new Tegra line, a complete system architecture on one chip. Built around a licensed x86 ARM 11 CPU, this tiny chip (smaller than a US dime) includes a processor, memory controller, southbridge, and 3D and video processors. The SoC design is meant to give iPhone-type devices a more impressive visual experiences while maintaining idle power consumption under 100 mW. While not a direct competitor to Intel's Atom or VIA's Nano processors, the NVIDIA Tegra will no doubt push the envelope in handhelds and cement NVIDIA's place in the world of computing going forward."
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Atom-Based Mini-ITX Motherboard Available 240 comments
LWATCDR writes "A company out of the UK is selling an Intel Atom-based Mini-ITX motherboard. It has a riser for two PCI cards, two SATA ports, and an IDE ports so it could make a great little NAS, firewall, MAME box, or low-power workstation. To add to the fun it has a real parallel port 'perfect for hardware hacking,' a real RS-232 port 'perfect for data acquisition,' and two USB ports. The price is around $100, give or take, and hopefully it will come down over time. All in all a nice system to run Linux, WindowsXP, BSD, or maybe even OpenSolaris on."
[+]
VIA Introduces the Nano Processor 162 comments
Vigile writes "While the VIA Isaiah architecture had been previously discussed, the new x86 processor is officially being released as the VIA Nano. The Nano marks VIA's first 64-bit, superscalar, speculative out-of-order CPU design and is being built on Fujitsu's 65nm process technology. While direct performance comparisons are still missing, the products being released could bring Intel's Atom platform to its knees: clock speeds as high as 1.8 GHz or as low as 1.0 GHz with a maximum power draw of only 5 watts! VIA's recently announced mini-note OpenBook platform is a likely candidate for the Nano the processors but they will likely find their way into mainstream desktop and notebook computers as well." Reader MojoKid contributes a link to HotHardware's story on
the chip now known as the Nano , as well as a January interview with VIA's Centaur design center president, Glenn Henry, who
"went into fairly deep detail on what VIA had in store with Isaiah."
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Not x86 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not x86 (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Not x86 (Score:5, Funny)
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Okay, sometimes they get it right by accident. (Score:4, Insightful)
The title of the referenced article is "Its not X86, but who cares?" There's no X86 in an ARM processor. It's a licensed design.
It was too much for the Slashdot editor to read even the first 3 words of the summary?
Parent
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to (Score:5, Informative)
Stupid lameness filter.
Not x86 (Score:5, Insightful)
Dupe (Score:5, Informative)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/02/1441214 [slashdot.org]
Re:Dupe (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Dupe (Score:5, Funny)
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WinCE... (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows CE just isn't a very pleasant OS period, and its flaws really start to show once you get outside of the smartphone market, where at least it has some experience, or the thin-client market, where abject suck doesn't matter too much. Whether or not you like Linux or Windows better, you'd be hard pressed to argue that Windows CE is better for anything resembling a real computer. Unfortunately, given that this is Nvidia, and the chip looks tuned to "support premium content" I'm not going to be holding my breath. It's a pity, really. This setup looks rather cooler than Atom, and capable of some really fun stuff, but I'm not sure how good the odds are of it ever making its way into a mininotebook or small desktop form factor.
Like on the Handheld PC (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Like on the Handheld PC (Score:4, Insightful)
As for WinCE, I know that it can be made to act something like a real desktop/notebook OS, I've used and deployed loads of HP "semithin" clients(mostly citrix or RDP; but limited builds of IE, WMP, etc are available locally) running WinCE of various versions, and I've used a few PDAs running it. It just doesn't measure up as a desktop OS. It looks just enough like Windows to screw with your expectations; but doesn't run Windows programs, use Windows drivers, or even behave all that much like Windows in terms of shell look and feel. Given their sterling performance with "Vista capable/ready" I'm sure that MS marketing would have no trouble explaining to Cletus and Maybell User why their bargain bin software won't run on that Windows...
Essentially, WinCE suffers from the majority of the shortcomings commonly ascribed to running a non-Windows OS on the desktop, without possessing any significant upsides.
Parent
Please not WinCE (Score:4, Informative)
The only valid reason to design in x86 these days is to run Windows. ARM is lower wattage and cheaper. Once you look at whole systems costs (battery etc) ARM comes out streets ahead. Most OSS can be readily redeployed on ARM. There is even an ARM Ubuntu.
WinCE is a very limited architecture and has no support for SMP etc. It is basically a toy version of Windows.
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I don't think so. (Score:5, Informative)
No SMP in sight, not even in the emulator. If you know differently, I'd like to know.
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Re:I don't think so. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:WinCE... (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, with Via making a complete reference design freely available, what could stop someone from making a compatible motherboard that could fit in the place intended for a VIA-based motherboard?
The Eee shows that any processor that can drive a web browser and an e-mail program can be the core of a successful sub-notebook. In NVidia's shoes, I would invest a decent amount of money to make sure Gnash runs fine on it and is as compatible with Flash as compatibility can be.
I would love to see a small sub-notebook with a fast multi-core, multi-threaded, ARM-based CPU, an XO-derived widescreen display, an iPod-class HDD and a battery that could power it all for 24 hours of continued abuse.
And I bet it could be done for peanuts, which means a huge profit margin beyond the wildest dreams of the commodity PC-compatible market.
Of course, I assume someone from Microsoft mentioned casually to someone at NVidia, perhaps during golf, that they could consider dropping some NVidia support on an upcoming Vista service pack if those Linux-running small CPUs start making inroads in the undead XP camp.
Parent
So what's the difference?? (Score:4, Informative)
If you were really keen you could stuff a few extra 1x2inch ARM cards in the box and have a Beowulf cluster in a sub-laptop box.
The sub-notebook is nothing new. I have an old Psion7 (http://newth.net/psion7/index.html) that must be 6 or seven years old now. It was a bit slow, but only had a 100MHz StrongARM CPU. A re-jig with a modern 600MHz+ ARM would fly!
Parent
Re:WinCE... (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the various NT ports, they aren't an encouraging picture. NT MIPS and Alpha are dead, XP for Itanium is dead, and there is no Vista for Itanium. Only Windows Server and a few of its variants are still alive. And look at the slow pace of the x86/x86_64 transition.
I suspect that limited platform support is a decent business decision for MS, they aren't stupid, and they probably know better than we do how much fun it would be to attempt to bludgeon every last software vendor for Windows into shipping multiarchitecture support; but I seriously doubt that anything short of the probable extinction of the x86 architecture would motiveate a wholesale move on MS' part.(Maybe a stopgap of some sort, x86 virtualization built into the kernel or similar, or a move of existing MS tech to a new environment
Parent
Re:WinCE... (Score:4, Informative)
To support a CPU is not enough. ARM cpu cores will typically connect to an AMBA bus (like hypertransport), but these SoCs will usually have the entire bus internal. You'll have a whole set of peripherals which need to be programmed all over again with little or no code reuse from existing projects. You need to understand how these peripherals interact with the boot rom and CPU in order just to load a bootloader onto it. If you have perfect documentation, you'll still probably need at least a decent oscilloscope or logic analyzer to get a heartbeat out of it. Talk to any firmware or digital design engineer about 'board bring up' on an unproven cpu platform, and you'll likely hear quite a few nasty anecdotes.
All this can be done, but it would save everyone a lot of time if nvidia supports Linux with a real board support package.
Parent
Don't underestimate ARM. (Score:4, Interesting)
Secondly, the ASUS EEE has shown that it may not br necessary to be x86 compatible any more. It is compatible, but it has sold many copies running Linux. That means that x86 compatibility is not required, since Linux runs well on many processor types.
OoO ?? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:OoO ?? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I doubt it. After all the die is less than one square meter.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Don't underestimate ARM. (Score:5, Informative)
Linux being OK implies that x86 is unnecessary.
Parent