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(or the processor understands javacode, which is highly unlikely, Probability --> 0)

Talk to Transmeta. Transmeta's Crusoe processor runs programs through dynamic recompilation of bytecode. Current products emulate Intel x86 bytecode, but the Code Morphing recompiler is a piece of software and can be easily replaced with one that understands Java bytecode or .NET MSIL bytecode.

Nope.

Transmeta, maker of the Crusoe processor for mobile applications (</marketroid>) contracts the actual manufacturing process out to Texas Instruments.

Moreover, they already have a working model using development boards, for from the front page of the link I quote:
It is written entirely in VHDL. Originally designed and tested using Altera's APEX20K200E FPGA and Nios development board, the design is now ready for the public.

Transmeta either have to decrease their MHz or drum into the public somehow that "MHz has nothing to do with performance".

Not really. Certainly, at the moment, Transmeta doesn't really compete directly with Intel for the home computer market. They specifically market with regard to the Crusoe's very low power consumption. This isn't likely to matter very much to the home user, but in large server farms where monthly power costs matter, or in dedicated hosting facilities where your power consumption per rack is limited, Transmeta processors make a difference.

Note that although the Crusoe does compete well with Intel type technology when compared processor for processor, the difference when power consumption is compared is staggering!

It all comes down to "power consumption, size, reliability and ease of administration", apparently.

And the marketing people at RLX Technologies should be shot for not having a press release up for this, as it's all based on their product...

Personally, I think that the transmeta Crusoe is the answer here -- check out its thermal characteristics. Less power and less heat were the entire motivation behind its development.

Andy

Personally, I think that the transmeta Crusoe is the answer here -- check out its thermal characteristics. Less power and less heat were the entire motivation behind its development.

Andy

It doesn't seem to be a new concept at all.

But I guess you knew that... :)

He may or may not recieve DIRECT monetary incentives to keep up the good work, but regardless, the line is crossed.

How quickly they forget...

This could be very useful in a large networked environment, for monitoring system status on your servers remotely. It wouldn't even require modification of the system, if your server has "statu page" accessible by web browser. Alternatively, you could use VNC and get the added benefit of not only monitoring your server remotely, but being able to perform system maintenance remotely.

I suppose the VNC scenario would depend on a couple of things:

1. Input problems. Can that stylus/on-screen keyboard be used quickly enough once you get used to them? Having to carry around a USB keyboard all the time would put a serious dent in its usefulness for remote administration.
2. Using the VNC server's built-in web server, which has permission to serve up one single page containing a Java applet that hooks into VNC to allow web-based control, might be a problem. Looks like the review had a hard time getting Java to work properly in Mozilla.
3. Using VNC like this might open up some security concerns, particularly if you're a large company. Under ordinary circumstances, you can tunnel VNC through SSH to increase its security, but I don't think that would work in this case without modifying the aquapad in such a way that Mozilla could understand SSH. Still, if you have the know-how that can be done -- ain't open-source great?

If you're a bit more daring, I bet you could modify this in such a way as to make it a nice, portable media outlet. It's got an MP3 player already. It'd take some doing, but you could make it capable of streaming movies over the network also. 802.11b's 11-megabit pipe is fine for DivX-encoded movies. (Note: the thing's OS is flash-based. If you try making modifications and screw it up . . . it wasn't my idea! Unless you are a Linux Guru, capable of causing device drivers to rewrite themselves by sheer force of will, it's probably best to leave well enough alone.)

One hopes that future versions might include 1) a hard drive, for example an IBM microdrive, which would make fiddling with the OS's guts a lot simpler and safer. Note that the article says the Windows CE version already uses a microdrive -- so maybe you could get a windows version, wipe it, and install Linux? 2) USB 2.0 instead of 1.1. 3) *Integrated* 802.11b, so you could use that PCMCIA slot for something else.

Finally -- that green-haired chick that serves as Midori's emblem is cool. I wonder what she's looking at. Perhaps she is looking down at Tux, and wondering how it is that she came to be co-starring with a penguin.

Is this the only current device using Midori Linux?

It's all gone rather quite since Midori first was announced last year - and the In Use page on their website has only 2 broken links and this device.

It seems a bit odd that they seem to be ignoring the (large) potential PDA & Mobile phone market in favour of webpads.

Incidentally, the Familiar Project is chugging along quite nicely producing a decent Linux PDA OS (for the iPaq only ATM)

Is this the only current device using Midori Linux?

It's all gone rather quite since Midori first was announced last year - and the In Use page on their website has only 2 broken links and this device.

It seems a bit odd that they seem to be ignoring the (large) potential PDA & Mobile phone market in favour of webpads.

Incidentally, the Familiar Project is chugging along quite nicely producing a decent Linux PDA OS (for the iPaq only ATM)

Well, we already have Transmeta calling their OS Midori Linux -- a blatant reference to Fetish Diva Midori.

Geeks? Perverts? Who'da thought!?!

-Mark

There was a scientific american on pbs a while back where they actually described people as human cyborgs. I don't think they were really cyborgs, what they really were was just people wearing computers. They actually already exist, and have been around for some years. Alec Baldwin even tried it out.

I couldn't find anything about it on the scientific american, but this another article on that website, somewhat dated. I think the guy that wrote it also envisioned wearable wireless devices.

Here is a wearable computer you can even buy, meant mainly for military, or scientific use, I'm sure you can get one. It runs a transmeta crusoe chip.

The future is close, and it will be cool.

There was a scientific american on pbs a while back where they actually described people as human cyborgs. I don't think they were really cyborgs, what they really were was just people wearing computers. They actually already exist, and have been around for some years. Alec Baldwin even tried it out.

I couldn't find anything about it on the scientific american, but this another article on that website, somewhat dated. I think the guy that wrote it also envisioned wearable wireless devices.

Here is a wearable computer you can even buy, meant mainly for military, or scientific use, I'm sure you can get one. It runs a transmeta crusoe chip.

The future is close, and it will be cool.

See Ampltd for their Tiny886ULP PC-104 board with a crusoe processor. Add 802.11 to that using CompactFlash or USB and you've got a low wattage high performance x86 system.

(other pc-104 boards with much slower cpus are available for a bit less money)

Secondly, can we please stop using raw processor speed as the only benchmark of performance? Everybody should know by now that not all XXXMhz chips are created equal. This is particularly important for a Crusoe processor, a design which does not emphasize raw computing power.

midori from Linus/transmeta

Did a search on the comments to see if there was any mention of midori. Didn't find any.

Any comments on Midori as an Embedded linux?

The US versions of the two Crusoe portables I was looking at in my previous Slashdot post about this, the Casio Cassiopiea Fiva MPC-205E and 206E, and the NEC Versa DayLite, are both available online, direct from Casio and the NEC from CDW or PC Connection.

The Transmeta ultralight noteboooks page also has "How to Buy" links for all the listed US-market notebooks.

Wouldn't it be better to just to be content with the current CPU performance level and trim down the power consumption instead?

That's what things like the Crusoe chip are trying to do. There's a niche for such devices, but processor speed goes onward, and programs can do more cool things. Don't you like cool things?

I for one am fed up with all the cooling gadgets. Processors should be able to run without any additional cooling.

But if you improve the cooling system--there's really no reason not to--you can get better performance. Everyone wants faster computers, right?

Just an idea - wasn't the Crusoe chip supposed to be ideal for this kind of thing? Much better battery life etc. (I get 12-14 hours out of my Libretto with extended battery, 4-5 with standard) and still minimum of 600Mhz processing speed.

Perhaps something like that would help power these items, without killing batteries every 3 hours.

both of those use more power than the crusoe.

(Not making this next one up: http://www.transmeta.com/developers/index.html)
"Transmeta will provide a Crusoe processor design package to qualified OEM customers. The design package will include Crusoe processor specifications and data books, system design guidelines, reference design schematics, and BIOS programmer guides. At this time, the Crusoe processor design package is available only for Transmeta's early product design partners."

So much for "open source". Hope none of you were relying too heavily on Midori.

My post wasnt flamebait, they were selling "Code Morphing" as its key feature, but from the benchmarks ive seen, its not faster than a p3/p4/amd cpus.

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?

Here's the press release from transmeta.
Enjoy.

You will not find a fully functional laptop with better battery life. It is a bit on the small side, though.

It was priced around US$2000. [Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with NEC, transmeta, Fry's, or Linus Torvalds]

Well, actually, that's kinda my point. He's been doing a ton of work that not a whole lot of folks notice. Granted RedHat is paying him to do it and Linus has another job, but still...

I do agree, and certainly don't argue the point that, an "award" isn't the greatest way to say "thanx, man", but some mention of the guy would be nice...

I agree. But in that case, he should avoid interviews altogether, since he probably has some idea of the questions he will be asked. Maybe he prefers talking about what he does at Transmeta.. then again, maybe not.

Note: if you want to check out its linux distro, it's here.

These are the types of systems I would _really_ like to have.

Low powered crusoe systems would rock, for everything I do at home.

If this is going to be a sustained computing effort, you can save a lot of cash on power consumption by going with the RLX servers. RLX Servers They use Transmeta's Crusoe processor, so they actually can pack 336 of these in a single rack! Definitely worth a look.

I currently use an old system thrown together as a NAT+firewall box. I don't like this setup, and it uses a lot of power compared to what it should, for the service it gives. I've also looked at Sun's netra x1's as a good NAT box. It doesn't use too much power, considering.

Well, the Crusoe processor uses about 1-2 watts. So, you're talking about 65 Crusoe processors to eat up the power of a single Itanium. If you're going by the entire motherboard with its components, an RLX 324 uses 15.7 watts of power.

I could go for a lightweight wireless touchscreen device to surf the web. If its screen was about 8.5" x 11" and had resolution around 800px X 1000px you would essentially be holding a pad of paper. It doesn't need a hard drive, or amazing sound or video, but it does need all the current web drivers/plugins and the ability to upgrade. Its primary function would be surfing the web, which provides email (with address book), chat, and even word processing in some cases. A simple task tray could bring up a calculator and an on screen keyboard (that could be alphabetical or QWERTY ...) so the user could type information on web pages.

Wireless and light weight are the key though. And it has to be able to view better than 80% of the web sites out there today. I think it can be done with *BSD or Linux. This is somewhat what Transmeta is shooting for with their web tablets they presented a while back.

I'd pay a few hundred dollars for one. It'd be pimp.

~LoudMusic

The eetimes article clarifies. They are designing chips using dynamic logic which has the disadvantage of eating up significantly more power. It is actually fairly common to use dynamic logic in chips, just not on a wide scale where power is more important than transistor density or speed.

x86 chips are not simple, and creating a dynamic logic design is not likely. The company seems to have very good background in automatied design tools, but chips on the scale of x86 CPUs are not created in automated tools, they are created by hand and optimized (like assembly coding to the software guys)
"Intrinsity's bare-bones test chip operates at 2.2 GHz..." This is not that impressive on a bare bones chip. They haven't even created an ALU capable of that speed. Nevermind a full CPU. This company also doesn't have any fabs, so they will be at the disadvantage Cyrix and AMD were at in their youth.

Overall, they aren't likely to be making x86 CPUs any time soon. PDAs and laptops can't handle the power draw, so I'm not sure where that leaves them. Maybe they should team with Transmeta to solve their power problems. :-)

Then what the hell is it? An emulator?

Bochs is an emulator. TuxNES is an emulator. DGen is an emulator. SNES9x is an emulator. Transmeta's Crusoe uses Code Morphing, which is an emulator. But WINE is not an emulator but "an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer" for FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris. It's also a complete Windows application server that uses thin clients called X11 terminals.

It shoudl be interesting to see what RedHat brings to the table for EMbedded Linux.

From my point of view, the processor is a piece of generalized hardware.

The idea of designing a processor and distributing the design freely has been around for a while. FPGA chips provide a possibility. Check out the OpenCores project. Then there is the Transmeta approach of a very general core processor with surrounding software. Finally, emulators come in and out of vogue.

PC Power and Cooling makes a line of silencer power supplies. They are very quiet (at least the 235ATX is), but I boycot PCP&C because they gave me a big hassle on a return.

Also, if you're intersted in cutting down on hard drive noise, power usage (and you want to be super cool too) then get a Sandisk Flashdrive. No moving parts and they connect to a standard IDE connector, pretty pimp.

Lastly, don't get a highspeed PIII laptop because the fans are pretty loud and boy do those things get hot, almost as bad as hot grits down your pants.

Hum, perhaps a Transmeta laptop with Flashdrive storage, running Midori from good ol' Linus?

-Speed Costs Money how fast do you want to go?

It's not particularly small. Compare it to a Sony Vaio C1, here are the specifications. The Vaio C1 is 249 x 152 x 27 mm, and weighs 1.1kg. That includes keyboard, screen, 30GB hard drive, and a battery. And the Vaio even has a Crusoe processor. What's so good about the "Ezmo"?

As one of the Midori developers, I feel the need to say something here.

1. AOL has a pointer to Transmeta's Midori Linux site in the "About" box of their client (which is the primary GUI application on the box).

2. All of the source code changes to GPL code made by AOL have already been rolled back into Midori. (In fact, AOL regularly sent us diffs of their tree.) The source code is at midori.transmeta.com

3. No partitions are encrypted. It's just a different partitioning format to allow sub-partition upgrades of cramfs. (It's all part of "packcramfs" which is part of Midori Linux.)

I should also add that we have enjoyed working with AOL.

Dan

...In this case, its Transmetas, and I bet you can get the information off their web site.

In fact you are correct. They do credit GPL here, on the Midori home page.

DocWatson

That would be Transmeta, makers of the Crusoe CPU. It's quite typical for a start-up company to be very hush-hush until they've actually released a product, especially in a highly competitive field.

Transmeta is a hardware company. He doesn't work on closed source software there--he works on the Linux kernel.
--

.

"The flexibility of the software-translation approach comes at a price: the processor has to dedicate some of its cycles to running the Code Morphing software, cycles that a conventional x86 processor could use to execute application code."--Transmeta Crusoe Whitepaper

VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) technology employeed by the Crusoe is essentially a software emulation layer for the majority of the CPU instruction set. This means that the "Code Morphing" software that translates instruction sets into VLIW words sucks CPU time. In other words, just because is a 633Mhz CPU, doesnt mean it will perform like a PIII 633Mhz CPU. This sounds like a step in the wrong direction.

What I would like to see is cooler chips so I don't toast my lap on the train. If new chips can do that, well, then it may be time to pick up some Big Blue stock...

You mean like Transmeta chips? They don't even need CPU fans. You *DO* own some Transmeta stock, don't you? Surely you're not just shooting off at the mouth about buying IBM's stock?

Sorry to be grumpy about this, but I can't believe how far Transmeta has fallen, and how much geeks like us have let them down. They built exactly what they said they were going to build - a cooler, lower-power CPU that's 100% Intel-compatible, and nobody seems to be buying the product that we all got so excited about. Everybody says they want cooler chips, lower-power chips, but then it's the ridiculously hot, power-sucking Athlons that get all the press. Wonder why that is?

At the CeBit in Hannover on Saturday I was able to hold and play with a ProGear webpad from Frontpath. It features a 400MHz Crusoe and a about 10" touchscreen display. It runs Transmeta's Midori Linux. In the demo version they were running Netscape (only), the X Server let you rotate the view in all directions, and it supports a (not yet finished) handwriting support (and of course on-screen keyboard). In the completed version it will support other applications (i.e. probably be a full Linux system). It was linked up with a WaveLan card and the overall performance was impressive. (From what I heard a touchscreen that big is a pretty tricky thing to implement.) This might be a nice alternative to a MS WebPad, especially for people who like to play with such things - it features almost all the things this MS WebPad will have, and it comes with Linux ;-)

On the other hand, the people there from Frontpath said that at the moment they are concentrating more on B2B deals - many businesses want to use it for things like taking inverntory, medial purposes, etc. Whether or not this will catch on with the general public remains to be seen... but with all the places that have wavelans set up, it might soon be possible to surf anywhere, anytime ;-)

At the CeBit in Hannover on Saturday I was able to hold and play with a ProGear webpad from Frontpath. It features a 400MHz Crusoe and a about 10" touchscreen display. It runs Transmeta's Midori Linux. In the demo version they were running Netscape (only), the X Server let you rotate the view in all directions, and it supports a (not yet finished) handwriting support (and of course on-screen keyboard). In the completed version it will support other applications (i.e. probably be a full Linux system). It was linked up with a WaveLan card and the overall performance was impressive. (From what I heard a touchscreen that big is a pretty tricky thing to implement.) This might be a nice alternative to a MS WebPad, especially for people who like to play with such things - it features almost all the things this MS WebPad will have, and it comes with Linux ;-)

On the other hand, the people there from Frontpath said that at the moment they are concentrating more on B2B deals - many businesses want to use it for things like taking inverntory, medial purposes, etc. Whether or not this will catch on with the general public remains to be seen... but with all the places that have wavelans set up, it might soon be possible to surf anywhere, anytime ;-)

Transmeta's official Crusoe web site

ZDNet > Reviews > Hardware > Crusoe

Apparently the chip delivers as you would expect any chip to, but it runs cooler. That alone is advantageous in several ways. I'm never the first to jump on the bandwagon, but I'm not the last either. I hope this thing really takes off...

And here's a link Look at the GUI/Windowing system package.

Glad to see someone in the Linux world realized that Anti-aliasing isn't next-gen technology.