Transmeta To Unveil New Notebooks Next Week
Posted by
Hemos
on Wed Jun 21, 2000 10:31 AM
from the they-will-unveil-it dept.
from the they-will-unveil-it dept.
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Transmeta To Unveil New Notebooks Next Week
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Simple question (Score:3)
What is the battery lifetime of a Transmeta laptop?
Everyone says they will have longer battery life, but no one says how much longer. How important is that 3 watt processor after you factor in the disk, chipset, and screen backlight?
--Bob
Re:Native OSes for Crusoe (Score:3)
You seem to be out of touch with the trends in cpu design.
Here's [arstechnica.com] a nice simple intro -- it may have been a
Basically, you don't want to code to the bare crusoe metal since that will keep transmeta from improving the architecture without breaking your software.
The translation of x86 instructions can be done better than transmeta is currently doing it. By only exposing the x86 layer, transmeta gains the ability to totally redesign their chip without breaking any code. This is more important in the long run than a small speed increase.
Also, the crusoe is optimized for translating x86. There's no guarantee that coding on the bare metal would be an improvement.
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
Re:x86 code? (Score:3)
There is a version of Linux, "mobile Linux" which was created by Linus basically to enable it to work better in PDAs but AFAIK, it was not specifically optimized for the Crusoe per se, just for PDA setups in general.
-JD
Wasted heat!!?? (Score:3)
nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb
RE: SpeedStep (Score:3)
However, Transmeta creates a chip that runs at 700 HMz (which apparently works out to the same speed as an Intel 500 MHz chip), runs at as little as one watt, and only uses as much of the chip as it needs? DAMN!
You have to remember that Transmeta is shooting for a different core market than Intel or AMD. They are aimed at people who want decent performance and tons of battery life. They don't want really kick ass performance - if they wanted that they'd but a desktop and let Intel or AMD throw transistors at the problem.
Sure, the technology is new. But don't whine because you don't really understand it. Go back under your bridge and make your horse whips while the rest of us putt around on our horseless carriages (okay, that last bit was out of line, but it's apt enough).
Why Waste a Good Processor with Windows? (Score:3)
Notebooks based on the TM 5400 chip and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system are expected to begin shipping in North America and Japan in the second half of the year.
Windows is a resource hog. After Tranmeta has spent such a long time developing good code for its processors to save power and, from what I hear, make the chip faster than the current i386 architecture, why put a resource hog on a machine with such potential.
Take a look at the Palm top computers. They're running on 2 AAA and the PalmOS and the new Linux palm (I really have to trade-up for one of those!) and even the color palms last longer than Windows CE palm-tops. You would think companies like NEC would have realized this and put a better operating system on, but I guess it's still a Windows world out there.
Hopefully, though, it won't take long until we start seeing Transmeta-based Linux boxes, hopefully sooner than it took to see them on Intel-based boxes like we have seen recently with Dell and what not.
Re:Why Waste a Good Processor with Windows? (Score:3)
In case you didn't notice, the WinCE boxes are in the 100-200mhz range, which makes them considerably faster than a 20mhz palm which uses a butt-slow (but cool nonetheless) dragonball CPU in most cases. A quick recap for those who have forgotten: Dragonball is a Motorola MC68000 with LCD Control and a serial port (or some hardware convenient to interface to one?) built in.
This has the effect of making the Windows CE platform devices consuming much power, it's true. Heck, none of my amiga computers even had a heat sink NEAR the CPU, and those were predominantly 68000-based. This is a much smaller die/chip, but it's also a much finer process, requiring even less power, thereby generating less heat, etc etc.
Windows CE platforms consume more power because they use faster CPUs. This lets you do things you can't do on palm, like play mp3s. It's a tradeoff. While I agree that PalmOS is a better platform than Windows CE, it's not for the same reason you cite... And you could make a slower, lower power consumption Windows CE box, and it would probably run okay, but a lot of the stuff on wince (ha ha) is more intensive than the stuff done on palm, because the processing power has been available.
Re:Do we only care because it's Linus? (Score:3)
Before Transmeta existed, before speedstep was conceived of by intel, Motorola had CPUs which had a sliding speed scale. Mac powerbooks contained them.
Native OSes for Crusoe (Score:4)
Of course, you'd have the trouble of rebuilding all of the user land programs, too, but with the amount of work people put into things in the open source world, it wouldn't surprise me to see a Red Hat Linux 6.2 Crusoe Edition.
Like you, I'm tired of my laptop getting hot enough to scald my skin. It's time for laptops which run at a reasonable temperature.
Re:I won't buy one just yet. (Score:4)
If there is a problem with the chip ( somthing like the FDIV bug of intel ) they can distribute a hot patch for the interpreting code of the chip to work around the bug. This would give them time to fixt the bug and replace the defective parts. It would also keep the customer partially happy due to the fact that the bug is no longer a hinderance; now they only have a performance hit that, depending on the problem, may not be noticable.
Do we only care because it's Linus? (Score:4)
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing Transmeta fail. Nothing I have seen in their chip design actually suggests any kind of power to back up the battery life. Their handling of x86 code seems suspect, and the underlying design of the core instructions seem to show no speed benefits (e.g. like the Velocity engine of G4's, or MMX and SSID instructions in Pentium III's).
I say let them try, but take their product introductions with a grain of salt. I'm no conservative, but I prefer an established hardware infrastructure that works, over an unestablished one that sounds flaky (and we are only monitoring because some guy named "Linus" is involved).
And what shall be unveiled..... (Score:5)
The skies had grown black around the Transmeta towers. Everyone knew they were up to no good, so to speak, but no one knew the unspeakable horrors they intended to release upon the world. The only man who understood, and who knew the full ramifications of their actions was Linus himself, and he was in no position to do anything. But, he thought, I know who can.
He muttered the incantation quietly, so as not to trigger the tape recorder set to record whenever someone spoke in the room. Such precautions seemed unnecessary at first, but Linus had not anticipated the true nature of Transmeta when he had taken the job. Now he spent days translating arcane texts that would drive most men mad, and coding the software to drive the most diabolical machine man had ever dared to construct. It was by only the vaguest definitions a computer, driven by processors in a beowulf-style cluster. But there were no disks, nor any traditional interfaces. The processors drove masses of flesh and neurons, specifically designed with one purpose in mind. To summon onto the earth the most concentrated forms of evil known in the universe, and to attempt to bind them to Transmeta's will. However, Linus, having read most of the occult texts, knew this could never be, and the summoning alone would be enough to end mankind's existance as they know it.
The air crackled with the energy from Linus' spell. A warm, muggy feeling took over the sterile cold basement chambers. He was coming.
Suddenly, a vague shape took form in the corner of the room. Two eyes formed in the center of the wavering mass. In a low gutteral voice, it intoned "why have you brought me, Linesus of Linuux", using Linus' true name.
"you must stop Transmeta before they unveil their plan" Linus pleaded, knowing the great being's power would prevent the tape recorder from kicking on.
"I understand your problem, and I fully agree that this evil must not be unleashed. However, I require two things."
"ANYTHING" Linus cried.
"for my colleague, I require a certain young Portman," gnarphlager slowly stated, "and for myself, I require cheese . .
Re:Simple question (Score:5)
Those frustrations are weight and battery life, he said. "Frustration studies" done by IBM have shown that users want a notebook weighing about 3 pounds, with eight hours or more battery life, he said.
"If we can do that, we'll bring it out in the fall," Suarez said. "We're pretty confident that we can get close to that eight-hour mark."
Re:Do we only care because it's Linus? (Score:5)
I agree that a lot of the fuss here has come about because Linus is involved in Transmeta. But there's a lot more to their technology than Intel's speedstep.
Processors with multiple execution units have become very common. They work by looking for instruction level parallelism - in short, if 2 instructions use totally different registers, whose operands have already been computed, then you can execute them in parallel.
Modern processors tend to support out of order execution and use branch prediction to avoid wasting clock cycles. Both of these, combined with several execution units, make your processor very fast - but use a huge amount of silicon area (read: lots of power, space that could otherwise be used for cache, etc). Their other big problem is that they look at the program from scratch each time it is executed - which means they can't avoid old mistakes.
The idea that Transmeta had is as revolutionary as the early RISC philosophy. The original observation that lead to RISC was that compilers don't tend to make use of the more complicated CISC instructions (string operations, polynomial evaluation on VAX, etc) and that these operations require a lot of hardware to implement, and as such slow down the processor. The RISC goal was to use a small number of relatively simple instructions. This means that you need fewer transistors on the processor, which means that it uses less power. Having fewer transistors generally makes the processors critical path shorter as well, which allows it to be clocked faster. In addition, the simple RISC instructions allow easy pipelining - which in itself leads to a huge speed benefit.
However, modern RISC processors are much more complex than their ancestors. They support many more instructions, and implement things like dynamic instruction scheduling. This has lead to RISC chips using more and more silicon.
Transmeta's idea is to go through the same process of reducing the complexity of the processor once more. They save a lot of silicon by shifting work onto the compiler.
If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. The compiler is responsible for allocating registers, so it already knows about instruction level parallelism, and therefore it knows which instructions can be executed in parallel. If you let the compiler tell you this, rather than working it out in hardware every time you run your program, you can potentially save a lot of wasted silicon.
Transmeta went for code morphing because it saves people having to re-compile code to run on their processor. They gain the benefits describes above, without the huge cost of trying to replace the x86 instruction set. Their code-morphing engine effectively translates x86 (ar any other architecture they want to implement) into native instructions. It finds instruction level parallelism, and exploits this in native code (the Transmeta can execute 4 32-bit instructions simultaneously - although you are limited in what operations can be caried out at the same time).
By having the compiler do all of the work in scheduling instructions, they allow a huge amount of silicon to be saved - therefore reducing power consumption and allowing faster clock speeds.
There are more benefits. The code morphing engine can heavily optimise frequently used blocks of code. Potentially, they could store information about the behaviour of a jump instruction in their code, to allow them to do much better branch prediction. If you've seen the program execute 500 times, you've got a pretty good idea how it's going to behave next time in a lot of cases.
The point is that the x86 architecture has been a problem for a long time. It's old, slow, and difficult to optimise. What Transmeta have done is to find a nice, neat way to eliminate the problems caused by old ISAs. Effectively, they use a 2 stage compilation. Sun do this with Java - compile code to Java Binaries (platform independant) and then use a native Virtual Machine to run these. Transmeta are applying a similar concept, in a radical new way to their processor. The x86 instruction set is being used as the platform independant middle stage in their model. It gets compiled and optimised to native code by their code morphing engine. They've also been able to save a lot of silicon in the process.
And, since their code morphing engine knows a lot more about the machine it's running on (cache size / associativity, memory size, etc) it can probably do a better job of compiling code than most x86 compilers can. Gcc and the like are good - but if they have to support machines with many memory sizes, configurations, and know nothing about caches and the like, then there's only so much they can do.
Make no mistake, I believe that Transmeta has revolutionary ideas that will change the face of computing. No longer will legacy hardware be a problem for chip designers. Using the hybrid approach developed by Transmeta will allow faster and faster processor designs, taking full advantage of modern ideas, whilst still supporting legacy ISAs. It's a fantastic concept, and I hope they go all the way with it.
Battery life (Score:5)
Sure, it's butt-ugly (white with your choice of blue or orange), big (11.6" x 13.5" x 2.1"), and weighs a lot (6.6 pounds with the battery), but it's...
fairly cheap ($1599, last time I checked),
fairly fast (G3 chip w/ full cache... much faster than most PIII notebooks, which are crippled to reduce heat),
has a really nice-looking LCD screen,
has the cheapest wireless networking option of anybody out there,
and has a battery that lasts 5-6 hours (ymmv).
Best of all, thanks to LinuxPPC [linuxppc.org], they are great Linux portables.
No PCMCIA, but most of the stuff that you would use cards for (Ethernet, wireless networking, modem, USB) are already built in, so that's no great loss for most users.
Of course, if you can't get past how goofy it looks, maybe the Transmetta laptops are worth the wait.
Either way, I would hate to pay much for a Pentium-based laptop. They are slow, hot, and suck power too quickly.