Introduction
When
we consider the platforms available, we can take a look at three different views, one is Server based system, Desktop and Embedded systems. Each of these systems are unique from one and another. Few of these differences are size, cost and the purpose of each system. None of them can be overlapped in using them in the industry as I spoke above the internal workings of each is differently developed to suit each customer need.<><<>> >>
Background
When
we consider this question we can take a look at three different views, if we
discuss about the server based microprocessors their manufacturers are very
much concerned about the server uptime and stability issues. If it is a desktop system then you have to consider the usability and the reliability and ease of use, but most importantly the cost and lastly we can come to embedded systems which are very popular in Electrical industry more than computer science, because of the necessity companies use Embedded systems to ease their life. Embedded means they are built to act in a single purpose manner.
Architecture Overview
| It is to keep an enterprise network up and running 99, 9
percent of the time, from the hardware to the operating system to the database
to the application. So all the manufacturers are competing to introduce a
microprocessor which would be more powerful and much reliable than the ones
using currently. When you consider a good Microprocessor for a server it should
be a processor with low power consumption and less resources allocating
processor for System Cache. That's why most of the time they use Unix and Linux
as the Server based operating systems, because they take less amount of
hardware resources and use effectively so the heat which dispatches from the
processor is less and the heating would be less. |
<
>"We also did a
experiment to benchmark and test which operating system takes less hardware resources
and which dispatches less heat, for this little test we used a Intel 486 based
machine (very old…) . What we did was we installed MINIX 3.1 on a separate
partition (200MB partition) and MS-DOS on a floppy. After that we launched
several tests to check which one is faster and which dispatches less heat so
finally we put a large C file to compile on separate OSes. What happened was
MINIX one compiled it almost 3 minutes before the DOS based system and the
temperature of the 486 CPU was very low. But the DOS system took much longer
time and it was very much heated. But finally we came to a point assumption
that the MS-DOS is frequently using processor resources for its idle
operations.">
<> ~Benchmark
Test was Launched on 13th Aug 2007 >
<> >
Therefore by writing our own experience is just to convince
that most of the Server Processors are built to use fewer resources but
releasing powerful computing power.
But the Desktop Microprocessors are bit different from its
architecture as well as from the functionality their goal is not to produce a
processor which uses less resources for System Cache of the Operating Systems
but a processor which does more efficient work in a time unit. And also they
are not very much concerned of power consumption. The goal of modern
microprocessors is to deliver as much performance as possible while keeping
power consumption within reasonable limits. And the Manufacturers of desktop
microprocessors goal is to produce processor which delivers more power to the
end-user. Another important fact is out there, it is most of the programs which
are being used in desktop machines are designed to do long time processor
scheduling jobs like rendering a high definition image, or compiling a source
file. So the processors are also designed to adopt those kinds of processing.
Mobile processing is the most important factor which is
going to be in this century, most scientists are working on designing powerful
handheld machines which are performed equally as desktop machines. Embedded
systems are said to be implemented on almost all the intelligent devices
available in the market. From the blood-pressure monitor to the mobile phone which
is on your hand. We must convey something first before we proceed in this topic
that is most of the embedded devices is using Microcontrollers instead of
separate Microprocessors; they are an implementation of whole computer inside a
small thumb size chip called Microcontroller. Some old routers are also
designed using those chips. These
microprocessors of embedded devices are varying its performance due to battery
consumption and Instruction length issues. Most of the microprocessors are
designed using RISC architecture to minimize the complexity of the mobile
processor. And also to reduce number of instructions per processor. Embedded
device processor manufacturers can go beyond the speeds which have been a
standard today but the problem they are having is high power consumption and
heating. For example Intel has developed their new mobile processor named
"PXA737" and its original speed is 1024 MHz or 1GHz but that processor is
under-clocked due to the reasons I mentioned above.
So those are the architectural differences we can discuss
about mobile, desktop and server microprocessors.
Points of Interest
I very much like to play around with microcontrollers and built in pc boards so after writing this article what I thought about is performing a hardware based benchmark system for Microcontroller Architectures. Because it is not very much popular among engineers and we rarely find them on Internet...
