Single-Chip x86 Chipsets Around the Corner? 170
An anonymous reader writes "Kontron, a giant among industrial single-board computer vendors, yesterday revealed a credit-card sized board apparently based on a single-chip x86 chipset that clocks to 1.5GHz and supports a gig of RAM. It targets portable devices — not x86's usual forte. Kontron isn't saying whether the board uses a Via or an Intel chip(set) — both vendors reportedly have single-chip chipsets in the works, part of their respective missions to drive 'x86 everywhere.'"
Great idea (Score:3, Insightful)
"generic" embedded devices come to mind. ( but you have the pc104 standard there already..
x86 cores? (Score:3, Insightful)
Power consumption please? (Score:3, Insightful)
It targets portable devices -- not x86's usual forte
Yeah, that's not x86's usual forte because x86s are more power thirsty than say MIPS or ARM, which is why it would be interesting if the article could mention how much this new thing is supposed to drain.
Re:Who's in charge of code names? (Score:2, Insightful)
That was the best code name they could come up with? Seriously?
Given what they probably had to do in the area of patent licensing, calling it a "John" is pretty polite, if you ask me.
Sounds like a bad idea to me (Score:4, Insightful)
Can I pass on that? The x86 architecture may be POPULAR, but it's inefficient, forced into backwards compliance with horribly outdated standards, and has been horseshoed for the past 20 years into a full architecture chip when the initial design was never meant to become like this.
If a realm of computing has x86 as the non-dominant chipset, I think that's a blessing and it should remain that way. You can't do anything about the PC market at this point, for example... but I think the motto should be "x86 only where it already exists" rather than "x86 everywhere."
Re:Great idea (Score:4, Insightful)
If they can really pull off a good, stable, low powered chipset in the 1.5 ghz range.. I would be very interested.
Re:Great idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, what it doesn't say anything about is whether it's higher performance.
Re:Sounds like a bad idea to me (Score:4, Insightful)
The "x86 architecture" doesn't exist. x86 merely describes an ISA exported by the microcode of whatever underlying architecture a given chip really uses. An ARM chip could look like an x86 chip. A PPC chip could look like an x86 chip. The Core2 or Athlon64 could just as well export a traditional Motorola ISA as the chosen x86 - and with modern chips, they could do so with a microcode patch at boot time, you wouldn't even need to buy a new chip!
Thus, any holy wars regarding its efficiencies or inefficiencies must remain firmly rooted in the ease of actually using it for coding. I do so, and find it for the most part adequate. It traditionally lacked enough GP registers, but even that doesn't hold true these days (at least for AMD's version - Not 100% sure about the Core line). And for that matter, very few coders even bother with ASM anymore... Even firmware development (which I also do) uses C almost exclusively nowadays.
Not to say I want to see it everywhere, but we can't really hold the flaws of ancient hardware with no current connection to the ISA against it.
Re:x86 cores? (Score:4, Insightful)
God bless the USA where competition between GSM, CDMA, & what ever sprint uses has increased innovation such that the USA always has the best cellphones out of any civilized country.
Not that I don't think in
And Theo's quote can be found here: http://kerneltrap.org/OpenBSD/Virtualization_Security [kerneltrap.org]
"x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit. You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes."
Everything (Score:1, Insightful)
Literally.... *EVERYTHING*.
Including saving your (and my) miserable soul from going to hell.
Crap idea (Score:4, Insightful)
ARM, and at a push MIPS, PowerPC and SH4 own this space. x86 needs to offer something huge to get back in the game.
x86 should be like slavery in the 1820 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great idea (Score:3, Insightful)
But i do agree there is a large x86 codebase out there. ( but then again, there also is a decent sized codebase for ARM and other embedded processors )
Re:Crap idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Other x86-specific assumptions inherent in code (like atomic writes of different sizes, context switches limited to instruction boundaries) means that a platform porting of seemingly good multithreaded code can cause very subtle bugs. It's even possible to write Java code that is almost impossible to turn into a race condition on x86, but where you might do it on other platforms. You might argue that it's rare or that the code is "bad" and incorrect in the first place, but it's still there.
Re:x86 should be like slavery in the 1820 (Score:5, Insightful)
You were wrong. x86 isn't particularly impressive, but it's just a CPU, not a war crime.
It's pretty much inevitable that x86 will move into new areas, as embedded systems need more and more processing power for multimedia, x86 vendors spend more and more of money reducing power consumption, and the economies of software development more and more favor reusing x86 software, rather than spending time on optimizations for the other architectures you use.
Since Intel can't seem to make money on any architecture other than x86, they've eliminated their StrongArm/XScale line, and are replacing it with ultra-low-powered (sub-1watt) x86-based CPUs. VIA has long be trying to make inroads in the high-power, higher-performance embedded market with their own CPUs as well.