Re: you can't bash Microsoft enough

websnarf@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

[...]

> If you wish to decrease the heat draw from a modern CPU, can
> decrease the voltage and under-clock the damn thing.

I've been wondering about that. It sure would be nice to throttle
down a fast cpu for portable operation. But isn't there a lot of
leakage current in recent CPU's due to the thin gate oxide?

How about the registers - are they static, or do they have some
lower frequency limit?

Has anyone tried underclocking? Does anyone know how far down you
can go?

> Some embedded versions of the x86 such as AMD's geode processor
> (which has capabilities more similar to the 68332 you were talking
> about) also have very low heat draw, while running at several
> hundred Mhz (I don't know the details, you can look them up.)

>>>> And 16 32-bit registers!

>>> Yes, and these "Core Duos" have 16 64-bit GPRs plus 8 FP stack
>>> registers and 16 128-bit SIMD registers.

>>> Oh yeah, and one other thing - these "Core Duos" run at 2+ Ghz
>>> clock rate. How fast is that 68332 of yours?

>> We run at 16 or sometimes 20 MHz.

> You might as well be running on an abacus. You could buy a MIPS
> core and throw it into an FPGA and run faster than that can't you?
> Its got to be pretty close anyways.

>> [....] And we service up to 10,000 interrupts a second for years,
>> without missing a single one. And without crashing. I wish my
>> dual-CPU 3 GHz PC could keep up with that!

> Take the Windows off that 3 Ghz PC of yours, put VxWorks on it and
> it can service *MILLIONS* of interrupts per second with 100%
> reliability.

> Paul Hsieh
> http://www.pobox.com/~qed/
> http://bstring.sf.net/

Regards,

Mike Monett
.