AMD Releases 2 Low-Power 64-bit Processors

rwiggers writes "AMD has released two new low power processors for embedded apps. With a power of 18W and a chipset with 3W of average consumption [PDF] it seems we may have some interesting competition with Intel's Atom."

Re:point of sale systems?

[grub]

I don't understand why some seemingly rather simple applications would require a large amount of processing power.
When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

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Re:Cool

[linhares]

I love the fact that this will lower Intel's ability to interfere [slashdot.org] in the netbook market in a heavy-handed way.

Re:Cool

[MBGMorden]

I'm sure it's just a matter of time before Intel one-ups them though.

Always has been that way. Hopefully AMD will in turn one up Intel again, and the competition thrives. I remember back in the days of the K6-2 series of processors when an AMD chip never beat an Intel chip at anything other than price. You bought AMD not for any performance reason but because it was "good enough" and cost half of what an Intel chip did. It's great that AMD eventually reached a point when they DID beat Intel on price AND performance for a while. I know they've been slipping some, but I hope they keep it up.

Don't get me wrong - I'm no fanboy (I've got 5 machines right now - a Linux box, a Mac, and a Windows laptop, all running Intel chips, and a HTPC and my Windows desktop running AMD chips, so I actually have more Intel than AMD at the moment), but I really do hope that AMD survives, if only to keep Intel in check. Their prices are also still very competitive. I'm looking at replacing the aging Celeron 2.66Ghz chip in my Linux machine, and figured I'd like to go quad-core on it (it's my only remaining single core machine). Cheapest Intel Quad Core? $160. Cheapest AMD Quad Core? $80. It's a tad slower, but as a bonus the AMD chip burns about 30% less power as well. Looks like it's gonna be an AMD for that machine.

Re:Virtualization is even better for low-load serv

[Just Some Guy]

Virtualization is even better for low-load servers

Yep! Virtualization is great for settop boxes and remote backup servers, except for the 99% of situations in which it's impossible.

Re:point of sale systems?

[petermgreen]

The 8 bit processors on the other hand tend to be pretty good at the low level stuff, PICs for example can toggle a pin on one clock cycle and read back how the hardware responded to that pin on the next, they are also prety cheap. So in embedded systems you often see a 16 or 32 bit main processor to do the real work and then one or more little 8 bit microcontrollers to do all the fiddly hardware stuff that the main processor doesn't want to be bothered with. This design also may make the software easier as you don't have to learn about the driver development interface for the OS that runs on the big processor.

For $30 you can get a nice embedded processor that supports Ethernet, serial, PCI-E, generic I/O and more without requiring a separate bridge chip.
yeah but expect to spend thousands of dollars worth of design time and prototyping costs to develop a board but on it.

For low volume stuff I can certainly see the advantage of using a PC based board as the main processer and then using an 8 bit micro (which can be accomodated on a relatively cheap 2 layer PCB or even stripboard) connected by serial or USB as an IO processor.