It'll be an odd world if we ever reach the point where we throw hardware away before the battery runs out.
New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
81–90 of 92 posts
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intel did in fact build a RISC chip contemporary with the 386/486: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860 It had great instruction throughput performance by the specs but lacked in real applications, thanks to the sufficiently smart compilers never coming to be.
The i860's theoretical throughput was achievable only in very special cases in tight floating point kernels. Most code couldn't possibly perform as well, no matter how smart the compiler. Intel's sane RISC was the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960 , somewhat by accident.
i960 was actually a very nice architecture. It had features like proper memory protection, hardware GC support and others that we would absolutely love to have in this day and age.
It was a successor to the Intel iAPX 432 architecture. It also had shades of Burroughs B5000 in it (only RISC). I would love to see a successor to this. Heck I'd like to just have a development board to play with.
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I quite liked PIC stuff for the hardware USB support, which I used with a PIC32 DIP chip. They also have a gcc port for their architectures now, which is quite nice xc8,16,32. Although apparently the 'free' version of it, doesn't provide all optimizations annoyingly. I'm starting to use ARM dev boards now, because of things like the MHz and the nice compilers available.
PIC32 is MIPS. The older, smaller PICs are quite different -- also from each other.
I actually refuse to use PIC32 on principle because they took the MIPS version of gcc, added a license manager to it that disabled -O2 and higher unless you paid them a substantial sum of money for a license key, and then tried to make people use their crippled gcc by forbidding people from using the official PIC32 peripheral libraries with any other version of the compiler. It was a really sleazy end-run around the intent of the GPL.
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#84It all started with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbNnNF9JHFQ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tec... ARM low power consumption was an accident caused by financial constrains. Small team with no money (Acorn was starting to go downhill at the time) forced Sophie Wilson/Steve Furber team to be clever with resources. In 1987 hand routed ARM2 build with 30K transistors ran at 8MHz reachin…
I don't think that is a fair comparison. The 386 was a true CISC design while the ARM2 was RISC. One of the major points of RISC was to reduce silicon complexity by using a less complex design (and shoving the complexity onto software). Intel could have built an equal or better chip than the ARM2 but they were worrying about servicing the already established market for x86. P.S. Is it even reasonable to compare MIPS…
risc with multiply and add instructions :)
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#85It all started with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbNnNF9JHFQ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tec... ARM low power consumption was an accident caused by financial constrains. Small team with no money (Acorn was starting to go downhill at the time) forced Sophie Wilson/Steve Furber team to be clever with resources. In 1987 hand routed ARM2 build with 30K transistors ran at 8MHz reachin…
Amusingly, Intel have been marketing a 486 as their Internet of Things solution, in the form of the Quark CPU used on the first Intel Galileo board. It's been augmented to support the Pentium instruction set and ported to a newer process node and bus, but architecturally it's a 486. It's about as competitive as you'd expect a 486 to be against modern ARM designs - not very.
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#86The chip is so low power that it can be powered off energy capture from the body, as Andreas Eieland, Atmel's Director of Product Marketing for low-power products, demonstrated at CES earlier this year. The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120v battery, and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with the Atmel SAM L21 32-bit ARM MCU, the machines had found... all the energy they would ever need.
So, I'm curious how they convert the body heat to electricity in such a small area. If it were for something like a Stirling Cycle, you'd need a fairly substantial surface area to disburse the heat difference.
Peltier? And I suppose they would. You could still make a piece of clothing with heat-sinks sewn in, but I have no idea how expensive that'd be.
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#87The chip is so low power that it can be powered off energy capture from the body, as Andreas Eieland, Atmel's Director of Product Marketing for low-power products, demonstrated at CES earlier this year. The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120v battery, and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with the Atmel SAM L21 32-bit ARM MCU, the machines had found... all the energy they would ever need.
That quote is so totally non-scientific. For movies to get basic physics so terribly wrong is very sloppy.
MORPHEUS: For the longest time, I wouldn't believe it. But then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living -
NEO (politely): Excuse me, please.
MORPHEUS: Yes, Neo?
NEO: I've kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you're telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?
MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?
NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!
MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?
(Pause.)
NEO: ...in the Matrix.
MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.
(Pause.)
NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?
MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#88It all started with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbNnNF9JHFQ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tec... ARM low power consumption was an accident caused by financial constrains. Small team with no money (Acorn was starting to go downhill at the time) forced Sophie Wilson/Steve Furber team to be clever with resources. In 1987 hand routed ARM2 build with 30K transistors ran at 8MHz reachin…
I don't think that is a fair comparison. The 386 was a true CISC design while the ARM2 was RISC. One of the major points of RISC was to reduce silicon complexity by using a less complex design (and shoving the complexity onto software). Intel could have built an equal or better chip than the ARM2 but they were worrying about servicing the already established market for x86. P.S. Is it even reasonable to compare MIPS…
The other reason it isn't a fair comparison is Intel didn't get to start with a blank sheet of paper. The 386 had to run code written on the 8086, before anyone expected home computers to support protected mode kernels. I'm sure the x86 silicon Intel produces today would be quite a bit more efficient if it didn't have to support applications written 30+ years ago.
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
That quote is so totally non-scientific. For movies to get basic physics so terribly wrong is very sloppy.
MORPHEUS: For the longest time, I wouldn't believe it. But then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living - NEO (politely): Excuse me, please. MORPHEUS: Yes, Neo? NEO: I've kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The…
120v is not a measure of power, it is a measure of potential energy.
Re: New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who isn't terribly bothered by sloppy science in movies. I prefer movies that are entertaining or thought-provoking, not factual. Besides, the Matrix is about how our world is a simulation - who's to say how physics works in their "real" world?
If you want something to be 'thought provoking' then make it as close to reality as you can, that's good SF. The only thoughts this provokes in me is 'ouch'.
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