Transmeta To Release Next Generation CPU 148
CodeShark writes: "According to this story at CNN, Transmeta is set to release their new TM6000 microprocessor this afternoon. The chip apparently incorporates some of the functions usually provided by high-performance (and high price!) chip sets. Transmeta is reporting a further reduction in power requirements by 44% and sees the laptop and sub-laptop markert as the primary markets for their new CPU. Intel and AMD claim to be catching up with the Transmeta chips in terms of power requirements, I'd be curious to find out what the real world comparisons might make of those claims ..." If anyone out there is at Microprocessor Forum, please say in comments any further details that are made clear there.
Announce, not release (Score:5, Interesting)
They're announcing it, not releasing it. Production won't begin until the second half of 2002.
Press Release (Score:5, Informative)
Enjoy.
Do they have the patent? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Do they have the patent? (Score:1, Interesting)
Hitachi has done that a few years back at 1mW/MIP on their SH4 series which was supported by Windoze CE. ARM & MIPS take a bit more power.
Talk about deflated stock (Score:1)
Take a look at their stock price graph in the article. I shoulda sold short on Transmeta last year.
Sounds like a good chip. Hope they aren't going under any time soon.
- Freed
Stock price nearly doubled in past week (Score:2, Informative)
Re:transmeta well finally someone new (Score:1)
are AMD and Intel full of it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I just got a toshiba laptop earlier this year with a 700mhz celeron. I love it but I rarely use it without being plugged into the wall, as from my experience it only lasts about 2-3 hours.
I remember seeing stuff saying a laptop with a transmeta chip can have a battery life of about 8 hours.
Assuming that is true, how could Intel and AMD possibly say they are catching up? I mean mine is a celeron, not even a pentium III or anything and it sucks up power like I would have never imagined. I hope Intel isn't talking about their powerstep technology, that is just a freaking joke.
Anyone with more information on power consumption among the different chips, I would think Transmeta would have tons of information about this since it's really their main selling point isn't it? I better go check their site.
Re:are AMD and Intel full of it? (Score:2, Informative)
Transmeta's claims have been shot down several times because Transmeta doesn't have control over the power consumptions of the parts outside of the processor and the chipset.
Re:are AMD and Intel full of it? (Score:4, Insightful)
What the hell would I want with a x86 in my PDA? (Score:1, Informative)
Transmeta chips are only low on power consumption compared to other chips running x86 code, compared to other chips performing the same tasks they are definetely not.
The only truly viable markets for their code morphing are (sub-)notebooks running Windows, ironic with the Linus connection, and as a transition path for anyone who would want to make a dent in the desktop/server market (you could introduce a new architecture and still get very passable performance on x86, a lot better than Merced etc in any case).
Re:are AMD and Intel full of it? (Score:2)
No, no it won't. The Crusoe chip will only go places that we need x86 instructions. There is no reason that we need x86 instructions on a cell phone, PDA, or car stereo. All of those can use strongARMs, DSPs, and other cheaper solutions.
Re:are AMD and Intel full of it? (Score:1)
A chip off the old block (Score:2, Informative)
Re:are AMD and Intel full of it? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:are AMD and Intel full of it? (Score:5, Funny)
The only thing I've heard about is the revolutionary new Intel Pentium(R) [intel.com] processor, described by a company spokesman as "Like the pentium III, but consumes much less power." Operating with an order of magnitude fewer transistors, and clock speeds of up to 200MHz, the performance is almost as good as the Crusoe.
The best news is they're already released and available from reputable dealers [ebay.com] everywhere!
Re:are AMD and Intel full of it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Having just left Transmeta for gamier pastures, I assure you that the people writing press releases, designing websites, and manning show floors for VIA (Centaur), Intel, AMD, and Transmeta are after only one thing- money.
All of their "issues" and "features" are make-believe. They are fly vomit, meant to turn consumers into a common, runny soup of stupidity, that can be slurped without the need to chew on issues.
Speedstep is not a joke. It's a cheap, excellent hack, far easier to verify and debug than PowerNow or LongRun. Intel enjoys most of the power savings afforded by LongRun simply by implementing APM and getting the same job done faster than the p95 and therefore going to sleep sooner. Sensible, mundane, and vomit-free, but true nonetheless.
LongRun has problems with all kinds of applications featuring unpredictable loads. And so does APM. Each is good at a certain set of applications, but neither is clearly superior. And to overlook the critical importance of your choice of operating system, southbridge, video card,
Food, reconstitute thyself. Intel and Transmeta are in a deadly competetive battle. They are slitting their own wrists to give you 5% here and 3% there and need fly vomit because the numbers 3 and 5 don't sell product. Listen to your friends. Try a Transmeta notebook. Try an Intel notebook. You will like what you like. End of story. Every portable is completely different, no matter which CPU you use. Read reviews, friends, and personal experience, not corporate web sites.
I bought an iBook (Score:1)
And yet.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ditzel said Transmeta will prove, despite Intel's claims to the contrary, that the TM5800 beats Intel's lowest power chip by a factor of 2 to 1. "And when we go to our highly integrated chip, we're going to take off another 44 percent," he said. "So we think we've got a substantial lead today, and we're going to keep that."
And yet when we look at these laptops with their lower power processors, there is VERY little added battery life, for the simple reason that the processor is not the major consumer of power in a notebook.
When you factor in that the processors are much slower than the equivalent Intel or AMD (by how much varies by who you ask and what you're doing), and there doesn't seem to be any price break, why would anyone want to use a Transmeta processor?
Transmeta needs to stop trying to sell me that they are "more l33t than Intel" and show me products that are SIGNIFICANTLY better. If they can give me, say, twice the battery life it might be worth switching to an off-brand processor that is much slower.
Re:And yet.... (Score:2, Funny)
Just another chip manufacturer trying to hype it's product over features Cough*MHZ*Cough that do little for the average user.
Re:And yet.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And yet.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Dell sold the Latitude LT and the Latitude LS(nearly full-size machines) which had Intel(P/266 and P3/400) chips in them.
These machines have no internal CD and floppy.
When you remove some of the energy consumers, those that remain will be more amplified.
If Intel put PIII/400s or P/266s back into machines without internal removable-media drives, we would see an increase in battery life in those machines as well.
Re:And yet.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Here is a rundown of the top 3 microprocessors in 1998:
I don't know if Transmeta is focusing on the desktop market or not, but there are lots of uses out there for things like MIPS, which are almost never found in desktops. Try video games, laser printers, cars, etc., etc.
Re:And yet.... (Score:2, Informative)
These products would include things like Tablet PCs and wearable computers, ultra-dense servers, networking equipment, printers and set-top boxes, he said.
"As people want to go and include things like wireless technology in these things, where do you put the wireless chip? There wasn't any room left on the board," Ditzel said.
1998? (Score:2)
Macintosh G3/366, August 1998.
~ 7 Million transistors.
Re:1998? (Score:1)
PowerPC would rank 6th, with 13 million units.
Sorry for the confusion
Re:And yet.... (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, performance has never been there.. They can't even seem to get close to mid-range AMD and intel chips, so they changed position to "well, it's a LOW POWER consumption chip for laptops". Like the previous poster said, even if you half the consumption of the CPU unless you work on the LCD and other components you'll only increase battery life by a few percent. To the average user that's just not worth having to buy a more expensive and unproven chip.
The only other market I could see for them would be in an embedded pc market where a company sold hardware products spanning several architectures and wanted one a single processor they could work with intimately rather than having to learn the quirks of different processors on each architecture they have. Honestly I've racked my brain and can't even think of an example of such a company.. Maybe Cisco? I'm not THAT familiar with their hardware but maybe it spans more than one architecture.
Moral of the story: Just because someone puts out something you enjoy doesn't mean you'll enjoy everything they put out. That's the flawed logic that caused me to actually sit through an entire episode of That's my Bush! (shudder) What a stinking pile of horse-dung that was.
Shayne
Re:And yet.... (Score:1)
If you think about it, this has happened in the desktop world a few times. Pretty much everybody has had code running on Motorola 68K machines (Sun, SGI, MacOS, HP/UX) and then moved them to other chips. MacOS being the smoothest transition, with the 68K emulator as a bridge. BeOS moved from PowerPC to Intel, dunno if they had an emulator. They made the move so early in their existance that there probably wasn't a lot of code that needed to be moved.
Re:And yet.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Erm, I think that if you look hard enough, there are similar tricks going on in the Intel Pentiums (and probably others too) to give performace while still being compatible with even the earliest of x86 code. In fact, I heard somewhere [zdnet.com] that the core of the P6 is essentially RISC based, and that x86 instructions are converted "into simple micro-ops" prior to RISC style execution.
Sounds like "code-morphing technology" technology to me!
Sorry to disappoint....
Re:And yet.... (Score:1, Informative)
It's 2:30 am and I can't sleep, so this is probably going to sound incoherent.
The translation to micro-ops isn't nearly as complicated as Transmeta's code-morphing, mainly becuase it's about taking more complicated instructions and breaking them into simple, manageable pieces that can be chained very quickly.
Most of these functions are memory addressing functions. array_pointer+(item_number*item_size) can be addressed very quickly, but is multiple micro-ops in itself, not to mention the actual function that it is to accomplish.
It's also one of the things limiting the superscalarness of P6-based chips, which can handle Four micro-ops in the first instruction, and the other two instructions that cycle must be only one micro-op. I think Athlons are not bound by this limitation, however.
Code-morphing is more taking the code, converting it to a new instruction set, and then keeping that code around. Transmeta throws in some nifty optimization gizmos, too. It also _saves_ this information, which is usually much larger space-wise than the original instructions, but is still quite nice.
Essentially, it's an optimizing emulator in hardware. Old idea, new hardware.
Power wasters (Score:1)
Re:And yet.... (Score:1)
Apple Powerbooks [apple.com]. Battery life of 5 hours compared to the 2.5-3 hours I keep hearing from PC books (I'm not an Apple fanatic, but their PBK's are good).
Re:And yet.... (Score:2)
the processors are much slower than the equivalent Intel or AMD (by how much varies by who you ask and what you're doing)
Verily.
I've always been curious as to how fast the Transmeta chips are in real life.
I got the impression that the inherent adaptability of the Transmeta Crusoe only shined in benchmarks where the repetitive nature of the processing was a significant part of the workload.
And that the Crusoe came out wimpy on the typical standard benchmarks because of this.
So I've been curious whether laptop users with the Crusoe find it fast for what they spend time doing with their laptops, or whether that kind of optimization is practically irrelevant.
Transmeta only good for power consumption? (Score:2, Interesting)
Is all that Transmeta just about power consumption now?
Re:Transmeta only good for power consumption? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Transmeta only good for power consumption? (Score:3, Insightful)
Compared to an actual Intel or AMD CPU that actually has these instructions hardwired, the Transmeta chip makes a pathetic showing.
Re:Transmeta only good for power consumption? (Score:2, Informative)
HP actually found that some code actually ran faster in their PA-RISC emulator for PA-RISC than on the bare hardware! Perhapse HP was using the equivalent of gcc -O instead of gcc -O2 in their trials, thus giving more room for dynamic optimizations, but they got good results for an early project. Dynamic code optimization still looks promising. HP is working on a product utilizing quick-and-dirty PA-RISC to IA-64 translation and dynamic code optimization to ease the transition from PA-RISC to IA-64.
The HP Dynamo [hp.com] project has some good arguments about why dynamic optimizations might be becomming increasingly usefull. Basically, HP was researching emmulation, so they wrote a PA-RISC emulator to run on PA-RISC and put in some dynamic code optimization to increase performance of commonly run code. There's the old rule of thumb that 80% of your CPU time is spent on 20% of the code, so they concentrate expensive optimizations on the commonly run code, after on-the fly profiling indicates which areas should be optimized. It's like having a -O4 option for gcc and only using it on the code that gets run alot, in order to avoid all the bloat associated with gcc -O3.
Personally, I'd love to see AMD or Intell throw away hardware emulation of the ancient x86 instruction set. The greatly restricted number of registers causes the compilers to really hide the inherent parallelism in the source code. A lot of chip realestate is wasted in extracting the parallelism back out of the binaries. It's not as bad as the stack-based JVM, but the x86 instruction set is pretty bad about expressing parallelism in the source code. I think software emulation of legacy apps is where it's at. If Intel or AMD released an x86 emulator for thier new chipsets and got Microsoft to go along with the idea of software emulation of x86, then we'd see native apps running much more efficiently. It's my understanding that IA-64 kind-of does this with an x86 emulation mode. However, I think that chip realestate would be better spent on thins to speed up native code.
If I'm not mistaken, Win95 even had partial virtual DOS machines for each DOS executable. It's not too much more of a leap to emulate the ancient instruction set after you're emulating the ancient OS. Transmetta wants the flexability to completely redesign the native instruction set for each release, and that's understandable. However, it would be nice to move on to compiling into something that better expresses inherent parallelism in the source code.
Re:Transmeta only good for power consumption? (Score:2)
All I see them sell the cpus is on the power consumption, not the code morphing.
Valid question, is the power consumption all the TM series cpus have to compete against intel/amd?
Re:Transmeta only good for power consumption? (Score:1)
Does it mean you can get real high speed out of them when compared to the performance of an intel chips running at the same speed, or does the heat from overclocking come from somewhere else, meaning that you can't do this?
Re:TM6000 microprocessor? (Score:1)
Comments at the Register (Score:5, Interesting)
"TM6000" (Score:3, Flamebait)
Re:"TM6000" (Score:1)
Re:"TM6000" (Score:1)
Damn that thing was slow. Barely functioned as an XServer,
Re:"TM6000" (Score:2)
Heat and Related Problems (Score:1)
Re:Heat and Related Problems (Score:3, Informative)
AMD's latest CPUs use less power and generate less heat. When they get to 0.13 micron with silicon-on-insulator and copper interconnects (Q1 next year), AMD chips will use 20% less power and run 20% cooler.
Personally, I preferred Zmodem.
Transmeta is a sad joke: Where are the numbers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ask them. If you get something other than FUD back, please post it.
Why won't they run the SPEC int and FP tests??
They try and hide behind low power claims and can spin FUD with the best of'em. Low power means absolutely nothing unless you know how much WORK it can do.
They will give you benchmark results only if you sign an NDA and promise not to tell anyone how slow their chips are. Most companies who sign the NDA decide not to use their product. What does that say?
I'd really like to see these guys compete with Intel/Rambust, but I have no respect for companies built on FUD, regardless of who is involved.
staff picture (Score:1)
When I saw it a while ago on the website I remember thinking that it must be a cool place to work because they didn't seem to have many camera-friendly marketing types, 8^)
Re:Transmeta is a sad joke: Where are the numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a fairer comparison would be performance/watts rather than a synthetic bench that doesn't stress how much work you can do. It should also take into consideration the support chips that other traditional CPUs require (it looks like they're building in a bunch of other stuff that you'de need secondary chips for on Intel and AMD).
Re:Transmeta is a sad joke: Where are the numbers? (Score:2)
Re:Now tell me... (Score:1)
ftp ftp.xfree86.org
bin
cd pub/XFree86/4.1.0/src
mget X410.tgz
bye
for file in X410*.tgz; do gzip -dc $file | tar xfv -; done
cd xc
make World 2>world.log
That builds the X server as well as many useful programs to go with it, but no fan and it won't make noise either.
The computer you run it on, though, may be a different matter.
What you say! (Score:5, Funny)
This is offtopic (Score:2, Interesting)
The G4/G3 processors are suposed to be more conservative in terms of power and all else should be standard laptop hardware. How do these compare to the Crusoe?
Data? Opinions? Anyone?
Re:This is offtopic [No, it's not :) ] (Score:2, Interesting)
Besides not getting 5 hours (ever), the battery meter (at least under OS 9.1) is pretty jumpy, changing times pretty strangely, sometimes up, sometimes down.
When Mandrake 8.1 is ready for PPC, I would like to see what sort of battery life it gets.
timothy
Re:This is offtopic [No, it's not :) ] (Score:1)
the ibook 99 claimed to have 6 hours
i usually get around 4
Re:This is offtopic [No, it's not :) ] (Score:1)
I have a sony crusoe picturebook with a double battery. I usually get 5+ hours out of it (pretty unimpressive in my opinion), but with a pcmcia wireless card in it, I get less than 1 hour before dead battery.
YMMV
Re:This is offtopic [No, it's not :) ] (Score:1)
I really am somewhat disappointed in the battery life, but then again a spare battery is something I wish I had anyhow.
timothy
plan II major? (Score:1)
Re:This is offtopic [No, it's not :) ] (Score:1)
What's wrong with Mandrake 8.0 for PPC? Doesn't it run on the iBook?
(Yet another) BFD! (Score:1)
CPUs and the "laptop market" (Score:1)
What I'd like to see! (Score:4, Interesting)
What if the crusoe chip could do the same to PowerPC-code?
Imagine dual-booting MacOSX with Linux x86 and Windows.
Now, that would be interesting, (and probably not something Apple would like).
Re:What I'd like to see! (Score:1)
Re:What I'd like to see! (Score:2)
Besides, you fail to mention that the Intel Pentium Pro to Intel Pentium IV and AMD K6 to Athlon, all do some translating internally from x86-CISC to RISC. They are RISC at the core. Are these failures? Hardly!
Re:What I'd like to see! (Score:1)
But I mention it because it has failed to accomplish most of the things that it set out to do: e.g. the lack of a "delete" operator is supposed to make memory management easier, but instead you just end up with enormous memory leaks if you're not careful; the VM is supposed to make your code run anywhere, but in reality you can only run on platforms that Sun makes JVM's for; the class libraries should make your code richer, but in reality you cannot even get the creation/modification date of a file; the language and bytecode are designed to allow tiny programming, but in reality you need at least 50MB to run a simple GUI app. Built-in and pervasive threading is supposed to make your code more responsive and scaleable, but in reality it means always having to worry about locking and having your 3000 client server die because the system runs out of memory to create new threads. And then there's bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs: there is no way to close the audio device once you've used it; input fields randomly acquire and lose focus (but this depends on the platform); the virtual machine never releases memory back to the OS (but, again, may depend on the platform); NullPointerExceptions in java.io.* code; copy & paste mostly doesn't work; drag and drop mostly doesn't work, etc. etc..
So Java is either not yet finished, or simply failing to live up to its promises. The fact that Java has gained some popularity with lazy college teachers who want to be able to pull entire tutorials off the web and business drones who can't even distinguish between megabyte and megabit just means that Sun has done a great job marketing Java as a convenience language (i.e. a simple language with most of the nasty-looking bits removed) for convenience people.
We have these languages every once in a while in the industry. Remember Pascal? Java is the Pascal of the nineties.
As for the CPU examples... Even the Motorola 680x0 series used microcode to map their ISA onto the hardware that they had, and microcode-based chips go back way farther than that. So it's not "translation" per se that I think is a bad idea.
The bad idea is to wed yourselves to a "Code Morphing Layer" when what your customers want is a fast, silent and cheap computer. Because while the "Code Morphing Layer" promises to deliver that (just like e.g. Java), in reality _it does not do so yet_, and you lose out to Moore's law and simple economics.
Re:What I'd like to see - MoBo (Score:1)
BTW, you aren't restricted to Mac OS for PowerPC - I got a set of AIX 5L CDs by being a signed-up "Solution Partner".
Re:What I'd like to see! (Score:1)
Is VLIW no good? (Score:5, Interesting)
One concern that goes through my mind when I look at the not very stunning performance of Crusoe is the effectiveness of VLIW (very long instruction word) processors.
Both Transmeta and Intel have bet that VLIW processors are the way forward. Intel's Itanium and Transmeta's Crusoe are both based around the VLIW concept. Transmeta hides the VLIW nature of Crusoe behind the 'Code Morphing' software that allows the chip to be IA32-compatible - Intel's IA64 architecture gives compilers raw access to the VLIW nature of the processor, and has (very slow) on-chip emulation of IA32.
Between them, they make up the only commercial VLIW processors around, and both are very poor in terms of performance compared to more conventional modern processors, whilst at the same time introducing some enormous obstacles to overcome - IA64 requires some very major changes to the way compilers work, and Crusoe requires major extra complexity in the form of the Code Morphing translation layer.
I don't wish to jump the gun, but I think this means things don't look too bright for the VLIW concept. Evolutionary enhancements to conventional RISC/CISC processors appear able to continue Moore's Law for many years yet. AMD has outright rejected VLIW for its future 64-bit strategy (x86-64) and none of the other major CPU manufacturers seem to be jumping on board either.
Have Transmeta and Intel made a very large strategic mistake? VLIW looks good on paper, but is it effective on a practical level?
It will certainly be interesting to see what happens with future Crusoe and IA64 processors.
VLIWs need goody compilers (Score:1)
The idea, though, is that this will be a win in the end (over purely dynamic scheduling) because, among other things, it vastly simplifies the instruction decode stage (and dispatch as well, I think) of the CPU. For certain applications of interest, the instruction decode is the primary bottleneck: whether because you're missing instruction cache, or because you just hafta do so much work to determine the data dependencies, register renaming, etc. that an out-of-order issue processor requires.
What seems strange to me is that the Crusoe is x86 ISA compatible. THis must mean it's doing all the VLIW instruction packing on the fly. My guess is that's not gonna fly, ehhe. What's VLIW buying you in this case?
I'm not an expert on VLIW, but that's my figurin.
Re:VLIWs need goody compilers (Score:2, Informative)
What seems strange to me is that the Crusoe is x86 ISA compatible. THis must mean it's doing all the VLIW instruction packing on the fly. My guess is that's not gonna fly, ehhe. What's VLIW buying you in this case?
A bunch of things. Primarily, the heat and power loss associated with the hardware decoding logic implementation does not happen since this is implemented in software. Second, ignoring optimizations, the decoding only really needs to happen once.
Finally, being in software allows for really complex decoding logic (such as trying execution based on radical assumptions, failing, and retrying immediately without those assumptions) to be implemented much easier, and also allows for that logic to be updated easily in the case of a mistake.
Re:Is VLIW no good? (Score:1)
Intel's been very careful (initially anyway; they may have loosened up a bit) to avoid using the term VLIW in reference to their IA64 chip, for exactly this reason. they talk about EPIC as the design architecture, but EPIC's basically one impelementation of VLIW.
Intel and their chips performance will both be further hit by the fact that VLIW - including EPIC - is notoriously hard to write compilers for, particularly ones that perform even reasonably. i've heard very little about AMD's 64-bit architecture, but if they're avoiding the VLIW mess, i'm quite hopeful that they'll blow past Intel's performance there.
of course, none of this really proves the VLIW concept is flawed, but the implementations sure all have been. and it does prove that VLIW - even in its EPIC form - isn't the magic bullet Intel's hoping it is.
Re:Is VLIW no good? (Score:2)
I'm not sure how the market shakedown is going to work, but we will have to move beyond the x86 if we want to see continued performance gains. There are only so many tweaks that one can do. Is VLIW the right choice? We'll see... in the meantime I'm sure AMD will enjoy a ripe stomping until the VLIW compilers and developer tools are mature.
JOhn
Re:Is VLIW no good? (Score:1)
The TriMedia 32-bit embedded processor cores have served as the computational heart for a series of media processor products. Originally designed in .35-micron technology in 1996,
As regards embedded processors rather than PCs, things like MIPS per Watt and MIPS per $ are important. If we compare apples with apples, VLIW doesn't look too bad. If you're allowed to have a chip with a huge noisy fan and a nuclear power station behind it, it's apples and oranges.
How does it compare to the PowerPC (Score:5, Informative)
"SOI and SiLK taken together with IBM's smallest 0.13-micron copper manufacturing process has resulted in a processor that typically dissipates 3.6W of power at 800MHz [...]"
New low powered Laptop (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:New low powered Laptop (Score:1)
Your choice I guess...
Re:New low powered Laptop (Score:1)
A
Power consumption question (Score:2, Interesting)
The drive, fan, and HD info is available. What about the rest of the parts?
Display, backlight, motherboards, CPU, etc...
Anyone already done the research?
TM6000 PCI Daughtercard (Score:2, Interesting)
As a kind of example, suppose the card was assigned a frame buffer address of memory, and reprogrammed to implement OpenGL transformations. Or perhaps load it up with Distributed Net, or a Quake server, or whatever.
Maybe, say, take a PCI ethercard, and modify it, adding a Crusoe processor, ramdisk, couple external connectors. Then the card acts like an ethercard which is connected directly to the embedded system. What I can't find is any documentation about how to interface the chip withought signing up as a Transmeta Developer Associate Member from an Approved Business Partner :-)
NEW! FEATURED Add your own mini-linux server, req'd: 1 PCI slot... NR
Transmeta has its uses (Score:3, Interesting)
I would love to have a Crusoe laptop that was as small and light as a NEC MobilePro: no moving parts, just a lot of RAM and some flash memory. Put Linux on it instead of Windows CE. Put in a Lithium ion battery. Give it a PC card slot so we can put in a 5 GB hard drive card if we want. It would rock. Sure the display would suck more power than the Crusoe, but why make the situation worse by going with some other CPU?
steveha
Re:Transmeta has its uses (Score:2)
goes without saying: such a device could start to really benefit from lower-power processors.
What bothers me most (Score:3, Insightful)
Talk all the shit you want about Intel, but I can tell you that I'm working on a board right now that uses a Mobile Celeron Mobile 400A: http://developer.intel.com/design/mobile/datashts
The thing is that TM _never_ published said figures (quickly: what's the MAX Watts a TM CPU can draw?), because supposedly all that we need to know is the power required to decode a DVD. Well, today that happens largely by the VGA controller now, doesn't it?
What suprises me even more is that Torvalds, if anyone, should know that using the simple HLT instruction in the idle thread, makes any Intel (or AMD) CPU draw a lot less power.
Even on paper I don't see the advantage of the TM CPU's. And I really hoped they would, believe me...
What I want... (Score:2)
Re:What I want... (Score:2)