

AMD offers up G-Series APU with 5.5 watt power draw  - ukdm
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/amd-offers-up-g-series-apu-with-5-5-watt-power-draw-20110523/

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angusgr
With all due respect to these continuing amazing achievements, I'm no longer
blown away by the ever-decreasing combination of price, size, power
consumption against ever-increasing GPU, I/O & arithmetic performance. It
seems clear this is just going to keep on at the same amazing rate, for quite
a while.

What I wait eagerly to be blown away by is innovative uses[1] for these
supercomputers that fit on your thumbnail and could be powered by the kinetic
energy you generate when you walk (excuse the hyperbole.) Bring on the
applications!

By which I mean applications of technology, not touchscreen apps. Low-power
server farms & netbook-/iPad-alikes are fine and all, but I'm excited about
what else gets created when excess computing power is essentially throwaway
cheap and super portable...

"Ubiquitous computing" has been coming for a while now, I can't wait to
actually see it!

</rant> :)

[1] iPads and iPad-derived ideas aside.

~~~
dman
You need innovation at all layers of the stack. imo our engineer friends who
work on lower layers of the stack dont get all the press and love they
deserve.

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unwind
If my math is right, 5.5 W means you could power this chip from a pair of
high-end rechargable AA:s for about an hour. That's pretty cool, for something
with this level of performance.

I assumed 2400 mAh cells at 1.2 V; two in series gives 2.4 V, powering a 5.5 W
load at 2.4 V requires a current of 2.3 A which said cells should be able to
deliver for one hour (2300 mAh).

Of course, this skips any contemplation of what voltage the chip actually
wants, which is probably lower than 2.4 V, and thus means some conversion
(with losses, etc) needs to happen.

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mvanveen
I know everyone's fed up with the bitcoin articles, but I still wonder what
this means for mining. Is there a CE or architecture guru who might be able to
speculate how this architecture would perform? The reduced power footprint
could make personal mining more viable in the long term as FGPU clusters start
to take over.

