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Intel powers an ArduinoIntel powers an ArduinoPosted Oct 4, 2013 21:16 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: Intel powers an Arduino by khim Parent article: Intel powers an Arduino for the first time with new “Galileo” board (ars technica)
Such is the price of having hardware convert the x86 code to something the processor can process.
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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.
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