Bij AnandTech is een verslag te vinden van de tweede dag van het Intel Developers Forum. Het interessante punt was gisteren een demonstratie van een CPU gebaseerd op de XScale architectuur die op zijn beurt weer gebaseerd is op de StrongARM architectuur. De Xscale CPU liet een paar indrukwekkende resultaten zien, zowel qua snelheid als qua energiegebruik. De processor kon namelijk op een snelheid van 1GHz lopen waarbij het energieverbruik op slechts 1.75watt kwam te liggen. Het energieverbruik was op lagere snelheden nog beter: voor een snelheid van 50MHz hoeven de batterijen maar 0.055 watt weg te geven :
Perhaps the most interesting part of the keynote was when Smith was actually able to show of the new product. Running Drystone 2.1 benchmark, the small development platform featuring the beta XScale core technology was first displayed running at 600 MHz and consuming .5 watts of power. Next Smith showed the dynamic frequency and voltage capabilities of the XScale processor core, dynamically pushing the chip up to 800 MHz with less than 1 watt of power. The chip was now running at over 1000 mips (million instructions per second), surpassing the watt per mips ratio seen an any prior product. Next was to push the XScale core up even more, reaching 1 GHz with 1.75 watts of power consumption and 1270 mips, a figure that seemed quite impressive to us, considering that the chip is targeted at low power, high performance hand held systems.
[...] Next was a demonstration of not how fast the XScale can go, but rather how slow. By taking into account the fact that power is equal to capacitance times frequency times the square of the voltage, XScale's dynamic voltage and frequency adjustments have the possibility to produce a very low power consuming chip. The beta XScale core demonstrated, based on a .18 micron architecture, was able to run at a mere .055 watts at a speed of 50 MHz. Still able to process 250 mips, the XScale chip at this speed is able to be run off a single AA battery. Although the 250 mips number coming from the 50 MHz XScale core may not seem very fast in comparison to the 1270 mips of the 1 GHz XScale chip, when it is compared it to the .25 mips of the IBM PC/XT or the 100 mips speed of the early Pentium chips, the 250 mips is quite impressive, especially when one considers the low power consumption of the chip at this speed.