China's Homegrown Computer Chips

People's Processor: Embrace China's Homegrown Computer Chips

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/st_essay_china/

Called the Loongson.


from Wikipedia :

Loongson (Chinese: 龙芯; pinyin: lóngxīn, academic name: Godson, also known as Dragon chip) is a family of general-purpose MIPS-compatible CPUs developed at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in the People's Republic of China. The chief architect is Professor Weiwu Hu.

Loongson is the result of a public-private partnership. BLX IC Design Corporation was founded in 2002 by ICT and Jiangsu Zhongyi Group. Based in Beijing, BLX focuses on designing the advanced 32-bit/64-bit Loongson general-purpose and embedded processors, together with developing software tools and reference platforms.

ST Microelectronics fabricates and markets Loongson chips for BLX, which is fabless.

The processor was initially named 狗剩 (pinyin: Gou Sheng), meaning "Dog Leftover" in Chinese, to follow the Chinese tradition of giving a newborn baby a humble name for easier upbringing and better health. "Godson" was the English name, as it is pronounced similarly to "Gou Sheng". Later, Loongson, which means the "Dragon Core" Chip, was declared as the official name, with "Godson" still being used as an internal codename by developers.

Low cost ARM processor development boards.

Low cost ARM processor development boards. 
http://www.emblitz.com/index_us.html

Out of India.

WHITHER C/C++ IN THE AGE OF MULTIPROCESSING?

I hope nobody minds, but this came to me from in E-mail from:

The Embedded Newsletter is delivered to you free of charge from the staff of Embedded.com. To view the Embedded.com site , visit: http://newsletter.embedded.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/hBTmz0HSUaV0FrY0NYs0EA

It seems very interesting.
I of course believe C and C++ will still be going strong in 50 years. I just love debugging machine generated code. NOT!


TECH FOCUS - WHITHER C/C++ IN THE AGE OF MULTIPROCESSING?
08-31-2009

After several weeks of debate over Michael Barr's recent column (Real Men Program in C) at the Embedded Forum, Dan Zak's reasoned response in "Poor reasons for rejecting C++" is a breath of fresh air. Although he is passionate in his columns on the applicability of C++ instead of C even for low level code, his main point in his most recent column is that it is necessary to use the tools appropriate to the problem.
But what is the right tool in more complex designs? Even major players such as Intel are uncertain. On the one hand Intel has been a major promoter of OpenMP, a parallel programming API extension to C. But Intel has also been much interested in Ct, an extension to C++ for parallel programming. And now Intel has acquired RapidMind, a software vendor with a commercial version of the Ct programming framework.
Which way to go, especially in embedded systems? To help you make up your mind we offer several articles on RapidMind's frame work including: "C++ Meets Multicore" and "High level programming model simplifies multicore design." We've also got articles on single chip coherent multiprocessing, multicore software design issues, customizing algorithms to utilize multicore hardware and the use of virtualization and visualization in multicore software development.
If Dan's reasoned defense of C++ is convincing, you might also want to read some of the other recent design articles on topics such as: C++ for the cautious embedded programmer, a survivor's guide to C++, MISRA C++ as an alternative to C and guidelines to using C++ instead of C in your embedded design. Good reading!
(Embedded.com Editor Bernard Cole, bccole@acm.org)

Breakdown of PC power usage

At my now dead startup Nisvara we where building Silent computers using passive cooling, and figure out how to build server rooms that didn't require air conditioning just outside evaporative cooling towers.

Our designed cooled each component individually so we did profiling of each components power draw.

I dont' have the numbers in front of me, but if I recall for a typical P4 3Ghz system we saw the total average power consumption at something like 75 watts when idle and 150 watts or more under load. With the ACPI on it would drop considerably when idle. (I am not including the monitors that also draw 75 watts or so)

Again we were more interested in were heat was generated so we measured power dissipation per component which for all purposes is directly equivalent to watts used.

We found watts for a component was quite different then the watts on the power line.

Why? Because in this breakdown almost 40 to 50% of the power was lost in PC's power supply's!
Both main and on the motherboards on board supply's needed for the CPU and chip sets.
This was very high since most PC power supply were only 60% efficient!
So all loaded inside the PC show up as almost 2x on the 110 volt power line.

So of the peak 150W coming in what's left after being stepped down is a remaining 80W or so.

Hard Drive 12 watts assuming 1 80Gb Maxtor DiamondMax.
North and South Bridge, 1 to 6 watts
Support chips, almost 1 maybe 2 watts, things like the NIC and other support components were insignificant.

CPU which could vary from 20 watts to 100 watts depending on it's load.
Running like CPU burn, CPU test or CPU stress would max out the CPU's power, again with the power supply low efficiency an 80 watt increase in CPU power use results in an 160 Watt increase on the 110V power line! We didn't not expect this when we started.

If you add a high end graphics (Nvidia/ATI) card then add on another 40 watts 2x so 80 watts on the power line.

Another interesting thing was 10 watts for fans!

Here is another unexpected result, the hotter the system ran the more power each component draw. This could add another 10% or so. So a cold system like just after power up uses less then a hot one.