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Intel powers an ArduinoIntel powers an ArduinoPosted Oct 4, 2013 17:12 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784)Parent article: Intel powers an Arduino for the first time with new “Galileo” board (ars technica)
From the FAQ: Can I use this board without a power supply? Intel certainly aren't doing much to lose their reputation for excessive power consumption. The Arduino Yún can be powered from the USB port, just like many of the other boards. Anyway, the Arduino product page is arguably a better summary for those of us who don't enjoy downloading PDFs as much as those in the semiconductor industry seem to. Still, it's nice to see additional diversity in this scene.
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Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 4, 2013 21:05 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] It's also funny to compare these three lines: 1. Arduino Uno: 32 KB (ATmega328) of which 0.5 KB used by bootloader So it's hundreds of times more powerful then typical Arduino, about 10-20 times more powerful then ARM-based DUE, but all that power is actually used just to boot it up? Ouch. Still it's nice to have somewhat overpowered "big brother" in Arduino family. But more testing in the field is needed before we'll know what can you use it for.
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 4, 2013 21:16 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Such is the price of having hardware convert the x86 code to something the processor can process.
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 6, 2013 2:40 UTC (Sun) by oshepherd (subscriber, #90163) [Link]
Erm, what?
The processor in this thing runs x86 code. That's, you know, a prerequisite of being an x86...
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 6, 2013 7:45 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> The processor in this thing runs x86 code. That's, you know, a prerequisite of being an x86...
Intel (and AMD) processors are actually RISC. They have not produced a true CISC processor since the Pentium 2 I think.
What they do have, however, is a hardware translation layer that dynamically translates x86/x86_64 machine code to another machine code format that is actually executed on the core processors.
The x86 or x86_64 is the 'ISA', a standard language interface of sorts. Another way to think about it is that you really have a x86 'virtual machine', but instead of doing the processor emulation in software Intel does it in hardware.
This is a very complex thing to do in hardware and maintain good performance. Normally this is not a big deal because the logic required to do the translation was much smaller then the rest of the processor, however as Intel tries to simplify their processors and scale them down they can't get away from the huge ISA translation layer.
ARM, on the other hand, comes out with new architectures on a regular basis. They don't mind breaking their machine language compatibility and will add and changes things as they see fit.
This reflects the different goals and successes of the original architectures.
This one of the major reasons why ARM has, so far, been ahead of Intel in terms of performance per watt even though people that license their processor designs have cpu manufacturing processes tend to be a few years behind.
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 6, 2013 10:56 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Intel (and AMD) processors are actually RISC. They have not produced a true CISC processor since the Pentium 2 I think. Apparently it's still true for AMD, but no longer true for Intel. I'm not 100% convinced that it's just a shrink of P54C but something like this highly likely: this will explain all observable quite well: that's how you can make it five times smaller and ten times more energy-efficient then Atom, etc. Five times smaller means that it has about the same number of transistors as Pentium !!! core and there are a lot of other things besides core!
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 6, 2013 12:31 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] I'm sure you can dig something up about this, but I'm also sure that various AMD product lines went through a transition to RISC (or started out life as RISC) with some kind of x86 translation being used to satisfy the needs of everyone who can't manage to recompile their software. See this page on the Nx586 with a note about RISC86 instructions, for instance. Of course, AMD have acquired technologies that should have allowed them to put desktop-class products into low power devices. The Geode CPUs (which will supposedly be discontinued fairly soon) are an example of this, although they apparently use traditional microcode implementing x86 instructions directly. Maybe AMD didn't see any future for this approach either in terms of power or performance, effectively bringing to an end a product line that in fact originally came from another x86 competitor, Cyrix. The NexGen approach was the one that worked best for AMD, I guess.
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 6, 2013 17:03 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
> Normally this is not a big deal because the logic required to do the translation was much smaller then the rest of the processor, however as Intel tries to simplify their processors and scale them down they can't get away from the huge ISA translation layer.
In SoCs like Quark, the *entire* CPU core is small compared to the rest of the SoC anyway.
I suspect power is a different question than you think it is.
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 6, 2013 17:39 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] In SoCs like Quark, the *entire* CPU core is small compared to the rest of the SoC anyway. That's true for most SoCs, but I doubt it's true for Quark. Quark is billed as ⅕ of Atom. Atom has about 50 million transistors thus Quark should have about 10 million. If you'll recall that even original Pentium had 3.1 million and also consider the fact that Quark is supposed to be synthesizable we should expect between 3 and 5 million transistors just for that single core. That's hardly small compared to the rest of the SoC anyway. P.S. Of course Intel could have used 80486 core which only had ~1.2 million transistors but in that case it's 400MHz will deliver pretty pitiful performance by today's standards thus I hope it's at least Pentium-class CPU. And even in that case it'll be ⅒ of the whole SoC!
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 7, 2013 5:36 UTC (Mon) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
From the Quark Developers manual, quark is clearly a 486 core. Even if the manual is quite clear not spell it out loud, all the instruction timings match with the 486 counts...
This is the first rasberry pi killer that is actually slower than rasberry pi.
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 7, 2013 6:31 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
They can clock 486 to much higher frequency.
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 4, 2013 21:33 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
Inside the 8M SPI there is:
- EDK2-based firmware (BIOS) - GRUB legacy - a Linux kernel and a tiny but functional Yocto system.
Arduino sketches run in user space.
The "bootloader" term is only kept not to confuse Arduino users - some haven't and will never hear about Linux.
Note GRUB is configured to boot (a bigger) Linux system from microSD (or USB) instead of SPI when a GRUB config file is found there in a predefined location.
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 5, 2013 12:32 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
There are quite a few USB-powered devices with an ARM (Cortex-Ax) core out there. They are about the same performance level as this board.
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 5, 2013 15:29 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Sure, but can they be used with Arduino IDE?
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 6, 2013 9:26 UTC (Sun) by kreijack (guest, #43513) [Link]
> Sure, but can they be used with Arduino IDE?
I am not sure if this is a advantage or not. You have a PC-like, which could hosts a real OS, which all the capabilities:
I think that thinking this board as an Arduino compatible board is quite limiting. You have the cons of both the world (low power, low storage of Arduino and high consummation and a complexity of an x86 board)
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 6, 2013 11:31 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I think that thinking this board as an Arduino compatible board is quite limiting. Oh, sure. But the important thing is that this is “Arduino board plus something” (similar to Arduino Yún in the spirit if not in capabilities). It's easy to create cheap development board (think STM32), but if it's not in “Arduino family” then people can not start using it easily. The only gain is that an hobbyist can start from a quite know environment. Sure, but this is large gain. Before you can learn to run you need to learn to walk! That's why Arduino (which is very underpowered and significantly overpriced) is so popular! And if you started with Arduino then obviously you'll want to work with something Arduino-compatible.
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 6, 2013 9:36 UTC (Sun) by fabo (subscriber, #49199) [Link]
Arduino TRE: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardTre
Intel powers an Arduino Posted Oct 6, 2013 11:09 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Well, to me “is expected to be available in spring 2014” means “it's not available right now”. And it's also very different from all other Arduino boards. But yes, when (and if) it'll become available it'll be interesting to compare it to Intel Gallileo. A lot will depend on price. Beagleboards are $45 nowadays and this thing is somewhat more complex then Beagleboard thus we are reaching the same $60 ballpark as Intel Galileo, but a lot of things can happen in the next half-year!
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