Dieter wrote:
AMD Geode NXs are low
power and have been upgraded by AMD to include some Athelon features.
The 1 GHz is only 6 Watts so you might need a small fan but no large
heat sink.
Heat sinks are reliable, quiet, and don't use power.
Yes, but ... (TM)
Heat sinks for most CPUs are also *large* and IIUC we need to fit this
on a PCI board. I said no _large_ heat sink not no heat sink at all.
Yes, it would be best to do without a fan, but many graphics cards do
have small ones.
Ah, it sounded (to me) that you were suggesting a fan *instead* of a heat sink.
Yes, I gathered that.
The real problem of course is that the PCI card form factor was not designed
with cooling in mind. The bus connector and I/O connectors should be on
opposite sides, not adjacent sides. Then you use one big, slow, quiet, energy
efficient, monitored, standard-size-easy-to-replace-when-it-dies system fan to
cool all of them. Kinda hard to fix that now though.
Is the Geode due for a die shrink?
I have found no specific information, but everything seems to get shrunk
if it is an on going product. AMD says that this will be a 10 year
product. So, if it doesn't get shrunk somewhere along the line it is
going to be obsolete.
Can the Geode be underclocked and still be fast enough? I'm guessing that
it is way faster than you need for desktop, and way slower than you need for
video unless the GPU does 99.99% of the work.
They make slower ones but the slower NX (666 MHz) is still 6 Watts.
AFAIK, they are static so they will run at lower speeds but 6 Watts
appears to be the static power -- no power reduction in dissipation with
a slower clock so no real reason to run it slower unless the bus speed
is an issue. Faster and power is an issue. The 1.4 GHz one is rated at
14 Watts and AMD says it needs a fan. As I said (poorly) before, the 1
GHz wouldn't need a fan unless the tight space on a PCI board made a
small one necessary.
And I forgot to mention that AMD does support Linux on the Geode processors.
--
JRT
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