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Arm unveils 1mm x 1mm 32bit chip: "years of battery life"
- antipax 15y agoHope that when the "smart grid" or whatever you want to call it does come around, it comes with the electricity equivalent of net neutrality.
- javert 15y agoWow. Let's have government bureaucrats control not only how we use the Net, but also when we can use our appliances! Why not just use nuclear to produce abundant energy?
- afterburner 15y agoBecause it's expensive.
- Symmetry 15y agoThe idea behind a smart grid is usually some form of the local utility company taking money off your electric bill if your appliances are smart about not using energy at times of peak load. Nothing about the concept means the government has to be involved.
- javert 15y agoHope that when the "smart grid" or whatever you want to call it does come around, it comes with the electricity equivalent of net neutrality. The post I was responding to was specifically calling for it to be government controlled.
- Symmetry 15y agoWell, ZigBee is what most governments are pushing for smart girds, and isn't totally free it is an open standard that anyone can join. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee </shameless plug>
- kiloaper 15y ago2.4GHz doesn't sound like a great frequency for smart grids if the nodes are spaced far apart.
- Symmetry 15y agoYes, if I were appointed dictator of the world I would certainly arrange things so that another frequency could be used.
- kiloaper 15y agoAt least in Europe it appears 868MHz is gaining ground and now 169MHz is being considered.
- Symmetry 15y agoYeah, there are lots of frequencies that are good locally, but not many that are good globally. If there were frequencies that were even just good in three of the US, Europe, India, and China that would probably be good enough.
- rwmj 15y agoLink to non-mobile site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17345934 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17345934 I'm a bit surprised this hasn't been done before. Can this chip be solar powered (I mean, obviously, with a small solar cell)?
- justincormack 15y agoNo reason why should not be solar powered. Around here all the parking meters are solar powered, just for cost of installation reasons. Wiring electricity in to 50bn devices would be a pain, unless they are electric anyway.
- ht_th 15y agoJust curious, wouldn't a place that needs parking meters already be on the grid? Assuming we use parking meters to earn back the costs of building the parking lot or to stimulate the use of other forms of transportation than a car in that area. On the other hand, having autonomous off-the-grid parking meters might be easier to install and maintain by a third party. Plus it allows you to start growing parking meters everywhere, even in the middle of nowhere. Let them pay!
- tesseract 15y agoThe ones I've seen have been installed as higher tech replacements for traditional mechanical parking meters. Solar power means the old meter head can just be removed from the pole and the new one attached, with no need to worry about running underground electric service where none was before. I'm sure the savings in installation cost more than makes up for the addition of the solar panel.
- anigbrowl 15y agowouldn't a place that needs parking meters already be on the grid Sure, but not having to dig additional holes in the ground is a huge cost saver.
- ajuc 15y ago
- acqq 15y agoARM Cortex M0+ processor specs: http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-m/cortex-m0plus.php http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-m/cortex-m0plu... Advantages over 8-bit and 16-bit processors for embedded solutions, according to ARM: http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-m/cortex-m0plus.php?tab=Moving+from+8/16-bit http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-m/cortex-m0plu...
- keenerd 15y agoInteresting that they only make comparisons with PIC and 8051. AVR still blows them away on many angles; particularly energy efficiency, community, ease of use on not-windows, and price. (MSP430 too, for efficiency and price.) I'm fooling around with the lower power ARM chips on weekends, and they seem like a great option when you really want to shoehorn in a full operating system somewhere.
- tesseract 15y agoI don't think of AVRs as being particularly cheap relative to their competition but I haven't tried to buy any in quantity lately so what do I know. Maybe things have changed.
- wtvanhest 15y agoI don't understand the connection on why we need such an efficient chip for implementation in devices which are plugged in. If the economic benefits were so strong for those devices being connected that should have already happened. What am I missing?
- mhurron 15y agoYou seem to be missing that it is always a good idea to save power.
- ssmall 15y agoYou really don't care as much when its got mains power but not all of these devices are plugged in. You will see them a lot in simple hand held consumer electronics like garage door openers, remote controllers, wireless mouses, kitchen timers and so on. In battery powered devices saving a mA make a world of difference.
- tesseract 15y agoSeems like a fairly straightforward evolution, they are claiming 11.2uW/MHz vs. 16 for the non-plus M0. Sounds like the instruction set is the same. I'm curious whether the M0 has been getting significant design wins over the established low-power microcontrollers like PIC, MSP430, etc.
- regularfry 15y agoIt looks like the trade-off is peripherals: the M0+ (as far as I can tell) doesn't have the goodies a generic PIC at the same price-point does.
- regularfry 15y agoReplying to myself: judging by the Freescale chips out there, the peripherals will probably get added by IP integrators. Should be interesting.
- tesseract 15y agoYeah, that's how the ARM microcontroller market works. I imagine NXP's peripheral set will be quite similar to the ones on their existing Cortex-M0 chips. Freescale will presumably base theirs on what's in their M4 parts, albeit scaled down. For another point of reference you could look at STMicro's Cortex-M0 implementation as well.
- sambeau 15y agoARM is a brilliant (if not the poster-boy) example of why the UK government should be investing in new technology companies rather than car manufacturing and banking.
- jahewson 15y agoEspecially as ARM originated from Acorn, whose success came from manufacturing the BBC Micro, for a publicly funded organisation (the BBC).
- gaius 15y agoAhem, Acorn paid the BBC a fee for every Beeb sold, as a licensing fee on use of the logo. Acorn were also almost overlooked in favour of a company called Grundy, which had government backing, but inferior technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundy_NewBrain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundy_NewBrain
- peterstjohn 15y agoOn the other hand, the BBC Micro would almost certainly not have been the success it was without the Beeb and the lift it gave to Acorn in the educational market.
- jahewson 15y agoLook at it as very well-priced advertising, after all the BBC effectively promoted their product. They nearly lost out to Sinclair Research as well, but that's a well known story...
- gaius 15y agoThe BBC were careful never to say "Acorn" on-screen (same as they never said Sellotape, it was always "sticky-backed plastic", to the amusement of the entire population).
- allertonm 15y agoI actually had a NewBrain, think it's still around in my parents' attic somewhere. I did quite a bit of real paying work on BBC Micros back in the day, and think they were great - but reading the way people tell the story today, one would be given the impression that the NewBrain was some kind of grim socialist piece of junk. It was actually a pretty decent bit of kit, quite a bit better quality than many of the other micros on the UK market at the time. In an ironic turn, the company I worked for doing the BBC stuff later moved into Grundy's old premises in Teddington after they went bust.
- its_so_on 15y agoI don't need years of battery life: I need 32-36 hours (of use, not standby). Then I can go from charging daily, like in the nineteenth century where you have to wind your watch up every night, and Sherlock Homes can tell a watch belonged to a drunkard by scratches around where you insert the winding key; how different is it to fumble with the power adapter jack? - ahem, to charging whenever it is CONVENIENT for me. It still wouldn't quite last through a long weekend at a lodge with just one inconvenient power outlet if you use it a lot EVERY day, but most people don't and if you do, you still only have to find a quiet period to charge it ONCE during the long weekend, like whenever the social activity dies down. How many people keep multiple chargers at the different places (home/office) they are, or even take one with them ALL the time, just so they don't get left stranded. All this is fixed if the machine has a longer cycle than you do, over a typical 1-2 day cycle. Then you can pick the most convenient time to charge up from 20 or 40 or 60 percent or wherever it's at by then, you can work on it it at a cafe without plugging it in after working somewhere else you couldn't plug it in the night before, or go away for the weekend with it without any charger at all, if you know you're back in the ofice Monday and are sure to use it less than that. In the meantime you don't worry, you aren't inconvenienced.
- stdbrouw 15y agoBut it's not because you don't need years that nobody else would. And it's not because you immediately link ARM to smartphones and music players that that's the only use for a power-efficient CPU. Think a little harder :-)
- its_so_on 15y agoI was talking about my laptop. Terribly sorry I didn't make this clear, too late to edit! I mean that nobody even thinks of making a laptop with the battery life mentioned. For office tasks, who cares if it's an arm?
- ramchip 15y agoI'm not sure it'd be possible given how much power would be drawn by the peripherals: screen, wifi, hard disks / SSDs, USB ports if used... although I do wonder if there are computers with netbook processing power and laptop batteries/form factor.
- hopeless 15y agoHow does a 1mm x 1mm chip actually get used? I'm guessing that the actual package would have to be much bigger to enable mounting on a board?
- jws 15y agoGenerally the package is big enough to get all the connections out at a scale that won't irritate manufacturing. There are tiny packages though, NXP (one of the ARM builders) has a 2mm x 2mm package with a similar ARM in it, but they can only get 16 pins out at that scale, 4 are power and ground, one is clock leaving you 11 pins to rule the world. (data sheet: http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/LPC1102.pdf http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/LPC1102.pdf)
- Tuna-Fish 15y agoThese are not sold as physical chips, but as logic macros, where someone implementing a soc pastes this on with all the other stuff he wants. The total chip size will of course be bigger so that it can have pins.
- dzhiurgis 15y agoPair it with bluetooth 4.0 ant implant inside my body. I will charge it myself once in a while using inductive charger.
- jfasi 15y agoWell, strictly speaking the Cortex A9 is supposed to be 1mm x 1.5mm, but that's: 1. According to ARM's promotional materials. No corroboration from licensors, as far as I'm aware. 2. Without caches. If you look at those pretty pictures of Intel chips, those huge swatches of regular rectangular stuff are caches, and they take up space.
- xxiao 15y agothis is mostly for msp430 I feel, msp430 is 16-bit and kind of strange to deal with, I'm happy to see this M0+ coming along to replace that.
- zxcvvcxz 15y agoQuick question: under specs for the M0+ where they say, >Enhanced Instructions >Hardware single-cycle (32x32) multiply option Does that mean their hardware can multiply 32-bit by 32-bit numbers in a single clock cycle?? I took a computer organization course where I implemented a simple hardware multiplier and it took a lot more cycles than that, so I was curious.
- abecedarius 15y agoProbably means throughput, not latency.
- omgtehlion 15y agoYou can create HW multiplier using only NOR+AND elements. It will consume a lot of silicon, but will work fast enough. BTW, most FPGAs have HW multiplier prebuilt block, because you will loose lots of flip-flops or LUTs (or both) implementing one yourself.
- gurkendoktor 15y ago
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