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It's as if he forgets the re-use part of being green. A custom Google Chromebook ASIC will work for that and then cannot be repurposed into anything else. To ad
by nemik 14y ago
It's as if he forgets the re-use part of being green. A custom Google Chromebook ASIC will work for that and then cannot be repurposed into anything else. To add new features would mean a change of fabrication for the ASIC which is expensive and IMO insane. A tape-out is rarely done for less than $500K USD.
Whereas a more general purpose design allows someone to reuse the hardware in a different way just by changing the software. Furthermore, with a more general purpose design, you gain economies of scale and the general purpose chips become cheaper as they get produced in larger quantities and get used in a variety of hardware, not just Chromebooks (as an example). A custom ASIC would only get used in one design and have to be re-done for all others. I believe this to be much more wasteful and less 'green' than widespread use of general purpose SoC's or microprocessors.
- khitchdee 14y agoToday's microprocessors use a billion gates and have to be produced on 22nm advanced processes to fit. The energy spent in producing each chip is pretty high. In the fixed function case, the gate count is a lot lower so you can use an older and cheaper and hence greener process. On average, people use their PCs for 2 years before replacing them. If a fixed function chip had to replaced say every year to update it with newer technology, it would be in the same ballpark. The change that you have to make is instead of promising your customer a gadget that is infinitely programmable through software apps, you have to ask them to decide what they want up front and stick with that decision for one year. This is a paradigm change from the user's viewpoint. Economies of scale are orthogonal to how you decide to implement the function.
- klodolph 14y agoIf I use my computer for 20 different things, then that's 20 different fixed-function chips to replace 1 CPU. It sounds like the opposite of green to me. Besides, you can already produce CPUs on old processes. There's a CPU in the remote control for your TV, and another one in your computer keyboard, and in your microwave. These have low gate counts and are built with off-the-shelf components. Replacing them with fixed-function chips would be an enormous waste.
- khitchdee 14y agoI'm looking at this going forward. In India, PC penetration is 2-3%. For the 97% remaining if we can build something that satisfies their top 3 information requirments cheap enough, we can really make a difference in people's lives.