HANDS ON GUIDE

4 - AMD's Geode

The chip that powers the One Laptop Per Child project

Although the likes of Nvidia and Intel are being as noisy as possible about their big push into development of low power, tiny chipsets, AMD has been rather quiet on this front. This is despite the fact it already has a product out there, in the form of the Geode, although AMD acquired the technology, rather than developing from the ground up.

The Geode comes in three flavours: GX, LX and NX, rising in performance and power consumption as the naming scheme moves down the alphabet. The LX is the most interesting of the product family, simply because it was selected by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation to be at the heart of the XO-1 laptop, which they plan to ship to countries with underdeveloped IT infrastructures in extremely large quantities.

The choice of the Geode LX 700 had little to do with performance and more to do with power. The XO-1 absolutely needs to consume as little power as possible, and have the lowest unit cost possible, even when compared to the average netbook, so the lowest performing Geode (433MHz) with the smallest power usage (1.3W) was chosen. In the target locations where the XO-1 will be used, it can't be assumed that there will be a constant power source present. The laptop's battery can even be charged by winding a hand crank to provide human power as an alternative if electricity is completely unavailable.

The XO-1's modest software suite is suited to the chip's low performance. Slimmed down Linux and basic word processing and web browsing are all possible on a mere 433MHz chip.

AMD's Geode NX processors are a different affair. Low power and cost go out the window, and instead we have a chip with performance more akin to the mobile AMD Athlon XP, suitable for embedded displays and media processing. These offer clock speeds up to 1.4GHz and are X86 based, so support Windows XP.

AMD's Geode line is solid, but is ageing - if the XO-1 was being designed today (the specification was finalised some time ago) it's hard to tell if the Geode LX 700 would still be chosen, given the number of alternative choices available. What was once a very attractive proposition for early Netbooks is looking dated and in need of an update.

For more details, see AMD's site.

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