> 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.
Posted Oct 6, 2013 17:39 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
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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)
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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)
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They can clock 486 to much higher frequency.
Intel powers an Arduino
Posted Oct 8, 2013 5:53 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
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Probably. But they are not doing that: this thing is only clocked @ 400MHz. If it's Pentium then 400MHz is in “not superfast, but faster than many others” ballpack, if it's 80486 then it's in “WTF?” ballpack. Adruino says it's 400MHz 32-bit Intel® Pentium instruction set architecture (ISA)-compatible processor o 16 KBytes on-die L1 cache which does not say us much: 80846 and Pentium has very little difference from is ISA POV and later models of both had 16 KByte cache thus 80486 looks plausible, too.
Intel powers an Arduino
Posted Oct 7, 2013 13:57 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
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> In SoCs like Quark, the *entire* CPU core is small compared to the rest of the SoC anyway.
I don't understand how that matters to what I said.
They obviously do the SoC thing because it's cheaper to produce computers were everything is in one big integrated circuit and it's more power efficient. It significantly reduces cost of the device because you can significantly reduce the complexity of the mainboard and such things. All the little chips and power converters you would need otherwise adds up considerably.
But that doesn't nullify or contradict the fact that x86 ISA causes significant overhead for the CPU that ARM doesn't have to deal with.
Intel powers an Arduino
Posted Oct 7, 2013 21:14 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
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> But that doesn't nullify or contradict the fact that x86 ISA causes significant overhead for the CPU that ARM doesn't have to deal with.
It does not nullify or contradict it (another discussion); it makes it irrelevant.
