Is the x86 Ready for Consumer Appliances? 105
rckymntrider asks: "By now, it's pretty obvious that the movers and shakers of the PC industry are shifting their attention to consumer electronics. Consumers today demand capabilities from their set-top boxes that PCs already deliver (examples: HDTV and gaming). They just don't want a bulky, hot and noisy PC next to their beautiful new plasma TV. Intel, for instance, announced several initiatives for bringing their technology to the media/home automation front, including the establishment of a $200M fund for companies in that arena (small change if you ask me). As a small manufacturer of media-centric devices (I will not name the company and product -- this is not a plug), I have become very frustrated at the availability of hardware for 'consumer' type of applications. ATX? Micro ATX? Too big. Eighty watt CPUs? You're kidding me! Mini ITX? Better but not powerful enough and *way too expensive*. Besides, every new piece of hardware that comes out is practically designed for Windows, and we all know that this is not the operating system that will drive consumer appliances, right? So to sum it up, do you think that the traditional x86 architecture, even with the advent of PCIX and the likes, is suitable for consumer anything? What other platforms do you see on the horizon that could still offer things like High Definition video capability and not double as mini-heaters? Have you ever heard (or envisioned) of a platform designed for powerful but still cost-effective consumer appliances? VIA tried with their EPIA platform but - in my opinion - they failed. Do you think Intel will do it? If not, then who?"
I fail to see... (Score:5, Informative)
As far as not being able to HDTV you're dead wrong, I've got an HDTV decoder in it which runs flawlessly (want a 40gb HD version of the superbowl? mail me a harddrive). Gaming is a no go for modern FPS, but even without using one of the 2 pci slots (riser card) the onboard video will run Half Life rather well, and most RTS (save WC3) and of course anything MAME can throw at it... Who wants to play an FPS on a TV but doesn't want a console anyway?
In short, if you think VIA has failed with their MiniItx form boards and the C3, justify that conclusion. All your complaints are either incorrect or baseless. Divx DVDs and HDTV all run beautifully on the VIA. As for gaming: the most powerful console on the market runs at less that 1 ghz and boasts a far from cutting edge graphics card so it's not lacking in power, just in development support. PC game companies aren't interested in supporting anything but bleeding edge tech, and in all likelihood people who want games on their TV will be looking to the real players in the market: Sony Nintendo and Microsoft.
But WHY? (Score:5, Informative)
This doesn't make it the best for most uses. It just makes it the most practical for a general purpose computer. But not necessarily an embedded device.
In the 90s, new, better architectures were introduced, but x86 endured mostly because of the large installed user base. PowerPC, Alpha, and SPARC, if given enough funding during development, would have easily toasted any of intel's x86 offerings. DEC had 64-bit chips before intel had pentium.
Many new platforms designed specifically for embedded devices such as MIPS and ARM (only ones which come to mind) have developed over the last few years. Backward compatibilty is not an issue here.
Look at TiVo. They used a 66mhz PowerPC in their 1st generation boxes because they ran fast and efficently, and without active cooling, and it was open and cheap (PPC is a VERY open platform). There is no way that an x86 at this speed could have performed the complex tasks TiVo needed it to.
Re:Just a Question... (Score:3, Informative)
Hell No! (Score:4, Informative)
A RISC CPU and a few DSPs could perform a lot of set-top applications, with tremendmous savings in both power usage and perhaps area (size).
High Performance doesn't not mean +100W consumption. If you don't need 4-way out-of-order execution (which is a really, really, really complicated thing to implement), complicated branch prediction, large multi-level caches, etc, then your power consumption will be ** A LOT ** less.
The fact is that many signal processing applications, don't require large amounts of memory, and they are highly parallelizable. Their algorithmns tend to be much more predictable.
Also, all processing & interrupt delays are known precisely in DSPs (this is a requirement in realtime stuff). This is also why caches, etc are not desirable, since their performance is not constant.
Simple DSPs can outperform desktop PCs for a great many applications, using 1/100th the power, cost, etc....
Re:MiniITX (Score:3, Informative)
Not really since the Via EPIA boards have hardware mpeg-2 decoding built in. My MythTV box easily handles 720x480 mpeg2 streams with hardware decoding using around 10%-15% of the 1GHz CPU for mythfrontend.. compare that against 90% CPU utilization for software mpeg2 decoding. It could probably handle HDTV if I cared, but I don't.
I don't know what this fascination is with incredibly high resolution television broadcasts. The ONLY use I've seen for it ever has been providing a blown up picture of Janet Jackson's boob from the Super Bowl half-time. Otherwise the Super Bowl looked just fine on my 5 year old 32" non-HDTV television. The problem with television isn't that it's too grainy, it's that the content sucks. Throwing more pixels at American Idol or The Littlest Groom isn't going to make it a non-sucky show.
Anyway, back to the original guy's question, x86 mini-ITX boards are great for end users wanting to build their own boxes without designing circuit boards and knowing anything about microprocessor design, but custom boards and buying CPUs in millions of units will always be the better option. Whether it be PPC or Strongarm or some Hitachi CPU doesn't really matter when you're custom designing your appliances for bulk purchase.
Re:National Semi was doing it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:National Semi was doing it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slashdot article... (Score:2, Informative)
I bought it a few years ago from Tiqit Computers [tiqit.com] (a company founded by some people from Stanford). It was their now discontinued Matchbox PC model. I believe Slashdot had an article about some guys at Stanford using one as a webserver back then.
A friend of mine actually installed Windows 98 on it... (It came with RedHat, but he wanted to impress people, and who is impressed by Linux running on small systems anymore?)
Advansys (Score:3, Informative)
Why bother? (Score:3, Informative)