Mark Roulo (nothanks@xxx.com) on 9/1/09 wrote:
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>Michael S (already5chosen@yahoo.com) on 9/1/09 wrote:
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>>Jonathan Kang (johnbk@gmail.com) on 9/1/09 wrote:
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>>>Michael S (already5chosen@yahoo.com) on 8/30/09 wrote:
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>>>>anonymous (no@spam.com) on 8/29/09 wrote:
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>>>>>>I'd really like 2mW i386 core.
>>>>>>Hell, give me 50 mW 50MHz 386EX-compatible chip and one of our clients would immediately by at least 1K units.
>>>>>
>>>>>At what price?
>>>>
>>>>I don't know what is the maximum price they are ready to pay but IMHO they wouldn't consider $20 an obstacle.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>If they're willing to go up to ~$100, you can design a sub-5mW 50MHz 386 processor
>>>into an Actel FPGA. The Igloo line is quite impressive.
>>
>>Within a given design budget I can not. Actually, I can't even imagine how much
>>it would cost. But I am very certain that porting the software to other architecture (like ARM) would cost less.
>>
>
>An interesting engineering approach (not necessarily economic given your volume
>...) would be to run a 386 emulator on a ~500 MHz ARM chip. Are there 500 MHz ARMs running at 50 mW?
>
>-Mark Roulo
>

Let's forget for a minute about 500 MHz.
Are there 100 MHz ARMs running at 50 mW?
I am asking because yesterday I took a look at Stellaris series of ARM-based microcontrollers from TI (former Luminary Micro). They look quite impressive in price and feature but 50mW they are not nor are they 100MHz.
Specifically, according to datasheet LM3S1150 consumes 47mA at 2.5V running while(1){} loop at 50MHz with all peripherals turned off. I'd guess multiplier-intensive code would consume even more.
ARM Cortex-M3 whitepaper promises 0.19mW/MHz at 100MHz frequency on TSMC 0.18G process. Luminary devices appear to be at least 12 times worse than that.
Are there companies that do much better than TI/Luminary in the field of power consumption but are comparable in features and price?