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Comment by malanj | Hacker News Reader

This comparison looks like bad content marketing at best. "The MSP430 family certainly includes peripheral options that current Green Array chips do not, such as flash memories and timers." => TI's 430 range peripherals is imo one of the primary use-cases.

MSP430's aren't trying to be energy efficient per operation - they are really bad at processing. What they are good at is running complex circuits/peripherals at a low total energy consumption over a long time.

The fact that they're running at 8Mhz is telling... that's far from the "low power" level. As far as I recall, you generally run using internal low-frequency RC oscillator for low power, and then just boot up the high speed crystal oscillator if you really need it.

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I can't imagine the utility of low-power processors that "aren't trying to be energy efficient per operation" and are "really bad at processing" - I thought that was the whole point!

These really are completely different type of computers - I believe if you can apply the MSP430 successfully to your application then the GA144 is probably the wrong chip to use.

But what if you need real-time nano-second reaction times on many separate pins? What if you need to process a 30 Mhz signal? While controlling a display and accepting input? All at the same time?

Then you might need the GA144, which can do all those things at the same time without needing to worry about interrupts or waking up from low power sleep modes or any of the other complex mechanism computers employ to minimize power loss.

  I can't imagine the utility of low-power processors that
  "aren't trying to be energy efficient per operation"

Consider the Amazon Dash Button.

10 seconds a week running a WiFi radio, TCP/IP, SSL and all that. 604,790 seconds a week waiting for a button to be pressed. Battery powered.

If you can monitor a button on 1 microamp, and run WiFi on 60 milliamps, 50% of your battery capacity will go on sleeping and 50% on waking.

And wake-state power consumption is dominated by the radio module, so the best way to cut down on wake state power consumption is to make the wake as short as possible.

That's the other side of low power devices, and part of the the beauty of asynchronous logic, it does nothing better then anything else! Computers like the ga144 'sleep' mid instruction waiting for a pin (button) to change, consuming only gate leakage for as long as needed.

I think that malanj's point is that the article is disingenuous because it compares the Green Array chip to an MSP430 product under a set of operational conditions specifically designed to maximize the MSP430 power consumption while excluding the many advantages of the MSP430 has in features. The summary of the whitepaper even start with the line, "there are apples and oranges in this comparison."

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