Thinking Small: New Intel Architecture Champions Sub 1 Watt x86
- Thread starter Unknown Soldier
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Agreed. The most a DOS game needed was perhaps VESA support for some of the extended video modes, but even then it really wouldn't be needed for handheld devices. A standard 640x480 VGA system would be perfectly adequate.
How many old DOS games need powerful CPUs? I was able to run most on my old 166MHz Pentium just fine. Atom should be several times more powerful than that. Many current high-end (not so high-end in a couple of years) non-x86 CPUs should be capable of emulating at good enough speed.
Biggest problem with playing DOS games on handheld would be the controller.
Biggest problem with playing DOS games on handheld would be the controller.
I'm thinking like Unreal in software mode, where a P/166 was enough to play at maybe 400x300 in 16-bit color, and a P2/333 was good for 640x480 give or take. A P3/866 was enough to play in software rendering at 1024x768 in 32-bit color, so that would be a great performance level to be at.
the maddman
Regular
Aren't these Atom devices supposed to be paired with a PowerVR based 3d accelerator? Unreal ran just fine on my Cryix P200+ with a PowerVR PCX2. Maybe we'll get lucky and the hardware will be compatible.
I don't know what's in these Atom devices, but I presume (nay, pray!) that this was a "tongue in cheek" comment about emulation of PCX2 by the latest PVR technology.
Unreal ran fantastically on my Voodoo original on my PMMX 166 too But even from a purely software standpoint, any of these new Atom processors ought to be able to spank it out in standard VGA 32-bit software rendering
But even from a purely software standpoint, any of these new Atom processors ought to be able to spank it out in standard VGA 32-bit software rendering the maddman
Regular
I don't know what's in these Atom devices, but I presume (nay, pray!) that this was a "tongue in cheek" comment about emulation of PCX2 by the latest PVR technology.
Oh yeah, that's tongue in cheek.
I don't see how anything modern could possibly be compatible with the old PCX2.The way you'd likely want to run these DOS games is via DOSBox, which emulates everything so obviously you'll need a much more powerful CPU than what we had back in the days. BTW, Simon, Kenton from EETimes (see comments) seems to think even the Centrino implementation of Atom will use SGX... http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle....MABJNEQSNDLOSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=206901894
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle....MABJNEQSNDLOSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=206901894chavvdarrr
Veteran
Why? We'll just slap Vmware iESX for embedded devices & voila ... we just need ESX for these "embedded devices"
Blazkowicz
Legend
No, Dosbox turns a 2GHz PC into a 486SX, and CPU usage will be high. A simple way to run DOS games is.. running them under DOS. which works perfectly on my newly built AM2 sempron with 2GB ram (618K free conventional memory , without sound and CD for now).
the DOS installation, tools and games were transferred to my third partition from another PC's HDD (K6 200, 32MB/2GB) by use of the sys command and xcopying everything (didn't take long).
it's MS-DOS 7.10 (from windows 98), very good at conventional memory and supports FAT32. the 4DOS shell is installed (tab completion!, aliases, more stuff), there is also free software ssh and scp (great!), provided you have a NIC with available/existing packet driver. (but that's more useful for the other, DOS-only PC). Games can be launched with a .bat menu, using choice.com, IF ERRORLEVEL and gotos. (C:\BAT is in the PATH, as well as C:\UTIL\PKZIP, etc.)
nice setup, I'm glad to have wasted time on it (will have to do a FreeDOS install as well). it just works no matter the PC. DOS just works. if you take account of DOS gaming while designing your micro-laptop you'll provide compatible sound card and NIC, a FreeDOS installation with LFN support on a small flash drive, USB with a driver for cdrom and mass storage maybe.
the device could be based on a x86 SoC and not even need the power of a 500MHz Silverthorne, be cheap, have a long battery life. and with RS232, so it can log on stuff and reprogramm stuff. That machine would also be ungodly fast, as DOS stuff is on that 200MHz PC.
, without sound and CD for now).the DOS installation, tools and games were transferred to my third partition from another PC's HDD (K6 200, 32MB/2GB) by use of the sys command and xcopying everything (didn't take long).
it's MS-DOS 7.10 (from windows 98), very good at conventional memory and supports FAT32. the 4DOS shell is installed (tab completion!, aliases, more stuff), there is also free software ssh and scp (great!), provided you have a NIC with available/existing packet driver. (but that's more useful for the other, DOS-only PC). Games can be launched with a .bat menu, using choice.com, IF ERRORLEVEL and gotos. (C:\BAT is in the PATH, as well as C:\UTIL\PKZIP, etc.)
nice setup, I'm glad to have wasted time on it (will have to do a FreeDOS install as well). it just works no matter the PC. DOS just works. if you take account of DOS gaming while designing your micro-laptop you'll provide compatible sound card and NIC, a FreeDOS installation with LFN support on a small flash drive, USB with a driver for cdrom and mass storage maybe.
the device could be based on a x86 SoC and not even need the power of a 500MHz Silverthorne, be cheap, have a long battery life. and with RS232, so it can log on stuff and reprogramm stuff. That machine would also be ungodly fast, as DOS stuff is on that 200MHz PC.
The biggest problem will be sound. Companies don't bother with DOS drivers for their PCI audio devices anymore. VESA VBE support may be an issue too. You'll also have to deal with slow-down TSRs for lots of DOS games and those utils are not exactly perfect to put it mildly.
DOSBOX is pretty quick as long as you can use the dynamic recompilation CPU core. I think Atom will be able to handle it pretty well as long as the clock rate is ~1 GHz.
A Core 2 Duo @ ~2 GHz runs about as fast as a P3-800 in DOSBOX under XP, in my experience. You can run pretty much any DOS game under DOSBOX as long as your CPU is an Athlon XP or better. And DOSBOX just keeps getting better. 0.72 is much faster than earlier versions I've used.
DOSBOX is pretty quick as long as you can use the dynamic recompilation CPU core. I think Atom will be able to handle it pretty well as long as the clock rate is ~1 GHz.
A Core 2 Duo @ ~2 GHz runs about as fast as a P3-800 in DOSBOX under XP, in my experience. You can run pretty much any DOS game under DOSBOX as long as your CPU is an Athlon XP or better. And DOSBOX just keeps getting better. 0.72 is much faster than earlier versions I've used.
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Like a GPU you mean?
Well, I think a hundred sub-watt CPU's are going to be quite a bit bigger than your average GPU, and would thus need to be separated onto separate chips. GPU's are clearly going to be much more powerful at least for the die area, if not per watt, due to the specialized nature of their processing.
I'm merely suggesting that once we have software, memory, and communication interconnects that are up to it, we may well have single PC's with hundreds of processors. Size limits don't seem to me to be too much of a problem, as we could cut down on huge amounts of die area per processor to focus on parallelism at the cost of single-threaded performance, leading to significantly higher overall processing power.
found this quote :
"In order to defend its entry-level notebook market, Intel is planning to launch two 65nm Merom-based processors for its Centrino 2 platform (Montevina), according to sources at motherboard makers. The CPUs include the Celeron 585 with a core frequency of 2.16GHz priced at US$107 in thousand-unit tray quantities, and Celeron 575 at 2GHz and US$86. Both will support 667MHz FSB and feature 1MB L2 cache and a TDP of 31W. In additional news, Intel has also set the price for its Atom N270 notebook CPU (Diamondville) which forms part of the company's Basic Mobile Platform at US$44, the sources revealed."
"In order to defend its entry-level notebook market, Intel is planning to launch two 65nm Merom-based processors for its Centrino 2 platform (Montevina), according to sources at motherboard makers. The CPUs include the Celeron 585 with a core frequency of 2.16GHz priced at US$107 in thousand-unit tray quantities, and Celeron 575 at 2GHz and US$86. Both will support 667MHz FSB and feature 1MB L2 cache and a TDP of 31W. In additional news, Intel has also set the price for its Atom N270 notebook CPU (Diamondville) which forms part of the company's Basic Mobile Platform at US$44, the sources revealed."
Here's Anands review of the technology:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3276
Interestingly, Intel wouldn't reveal who produced the 3D/video section of Poulsbo. Perhaps because ImagTech wanted to make the announcement themselves?
The performance details provided seem to show encouraging figures. I'd imagine a dual-core iteration of the Atom technology (Diamondville?) could be absolutely ideal for a low-power yet capable HTPC. You'd be able to build a tiny system with such low power consumption/heat dissipation.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3276
Interestingly, Intel wouldn't reveal who produced the 3D/video section of Poulsbo. Perhaps because ImagTech wanted to make the announcement themselves?
The performance details provided seem to show encouraging figures. I'd imagine a dual-core iteration of the Atom technology (Diamondville?) could be absolutely ideal for a low-power yet capable HTPC. You'd be able to build a tiny system with such low power consumption/heat dissipation.
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