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UPDATED: Transmeta's Crusoe Unveiled
There's two chips:
TM3120
- Scales to 400 mhz
- .22 micron process
- 73 die-type
- Released: Now
- $65-89
PM5400
- Scales up to 700 mhz
- .18 micron process
- 73 die type
- Released: Mid-2000
- Projected Pricing: $119-329
The chips themselves are 128-bit chips, and are aimed at the mobile market, as TM has said before. One of the incredible parts is their power consumption: 20 milliwatts of power in deep sleep, and 1 watt of power in regular usage. They've written their own BIOS, with Power Management on the chip called "LongRun". The chip actually gauges how much of the processing power that is needed and adjusts the power accordingly, meaning a much longer battery life.
The thermal difference is cool, too - the Pentium III is 113 Celsius, while Crusoe runs at 48 Celsius. That means no fans needed, another power saving move. And my lap won't be as warm. They're aiming this at everything from cell phones to laptops. At this time, they've said that samples have been shipped to "leading notebook vendors" but have declined to name them. As they've said before, IBM is making the chips for them.
What Linus has been doing: He's been writing a version of Linux called "Mobile Linux". It's written into the ROM and you can use the machine through a touchpad screen. The IDE and everything will be released to the Community. Yes, Linux has gone even more mobile. Oh - and Dave Taylor & Linus played Quake to demo it. Linus lost.
The x86 emulation is done at the hardware level - although emulation is the wrong word. We'll have more information on that as well.
We'll be updating this story - the press conference is still going on, but I figured people would want to know. This looks amazing. Check out ZDNet's tech coverage.
UPDATE by David Cassel
What I Saw At the Revolution
Transmeta rented an auditorium on an estate 20 minutes from their headquarters -- and everyone was excited. Walking through the rain -- past the huge lawn, the PacSat satellite uplink, and guys in suits talking into cellphones -- was Transmeta manager Rob Bedichek, who worked on Crusoe's dynamic translator. I asked him how he liked working at Transmeta, and he told me "The first couple of years," I'd wake up and I'd go, 'I have the most fun job in Silicon Valley." On the way into the auditorium I asked him about about the company ("The people I work with are amazing: people whose work I'd read about as a grad student.") and Linus. ("Great guy. Very capable.")
Transmeta had packed the press into an auditorium known as the "carriage house" -- I saw a dozen TV cameras, and I'd guess 150 reporters. A big screen filled part of the wall by the stage, flashing a fast montage of pictures (circuit boards, people's faces) over cheesy jazz music. But when Transmeta CEO David Ditzel took the stage at 9:05, there was a dead silence. "I know some of you have been waiting a while to hear about what we've been doing," he said to play up the tension, prompting a few laughs. "Some of you have been waiting four and a half years..."
Ditzel ran through his Power Point Presentation. (1995. "Something was fundamentally wrong with processors...") and pointed out that the people looking for solutions had been the entrenched semi-conductor companies. Then he announced, of course, Transmeta's "combined hardware/software solution.... The first microprocessor re-thought explicitly for the problems of mobile computing." By now everyone knows that it retains x86 compatibility while allowing a a completely new chip architecture. Ditzel remembered that when he was recruiting for Transmeta, after sharing his plans he'd hear, "If you start this company, I'll quit my job and come join you to do this.
Ditzel ticked off the specs, using phrases like "dynamic translation" and "software-optimized execution," and pointing out that only one-quarter of the functionality would be on the Crusoe chip itself. And there were frequent mentions of the mobile Linux operating system. (More about that later.) Wednesday's announcement was just the first two chips in the Crusoe family: the TM3120 (with 400 Mhz, 108 KB of cache, using 1 watt of power) and the TM5400 (700 Mhz, 400 Kb cache, and 1 watt of power.) Towards the end, Ditzel demonstrated a WebPad -- running Linux -- and pointed out that today's notebooks still use chips designed for servers and desktops. Then he staked his claim. "If it has a battery and a Web browser, it's going to be built with Crusoe."
Ditzel had to stress details for business reporters -- "significant staff" in Taiwan and Japan and "a very strong partnership with IBM -- and later Doug Laird, Transmeta's VP of Product Development, described IBM as "Great guys" and added, "We are in production right now." But I liked one of Ditzel's last comments: "Our goal is to fundamentally change the rules."
Doug Laird was more intense, arguing with current benchmarks ("Today's benchmarks address performance and battery life separately") and promising to show "what is fundamentally different here... Where's the beef." Using a red laser pointer, he ran through taped footage of a system running MS Word 2000 and Excel 2000 on a system with a Crusoe chip, "translating on the fly, as you're running the programs." Then he displayed thermal images comparing processors. (Sensing a photo-op, the cameras started flashing when he held up two "thermal solutions" and started talking about fans...) Laird made his point by showing a Crusoe system using less than 2 watts of power while playing a DVD and pointing out that it can adjust from frame to frame. (The audience laughed at the PowerPoint movie that showed two laptops playing a DVD. Two thermometers showed the temperature rising; then the laptop on the right started smoking...)
Then to break things up, there was the historic Quake showdown between Quake co-creator David Taylor and Linus. "I can't think of anybody better on the face of the planet to demonstrate Crusoe on Linux than Linus Torvalds," Laird joked. The photographers rushed towards the stage again for the even-more-obvious photo-op as Linus came out in his denim shirt, jeans, and sandals. ("I'd like to point out that if I lose, it's not the operating system," Linus joked.) It all ended when Linus fired all his bullets in a spray, then got nailed when he ran out of ammo. (Later in the press conference, after a bunch of questions about his role and Transmeta, Linus referred back to the Quake game, saying it was "meant to show that I'm here, but I'm not supposed to be the main point of it all.") One of Transmeta's technical staffers told me at lunch that "We all knew Linus was gonna get his ass kicked," and sure enough, when I asked Dave Taylor what he thought of Linus's Quake-playing, he said "I thought he sucked." But then he added modestly "I suck at code compared to him. So that felt good."
After the Quake match, the scripted presentation ended and the open press conference began. Linus had worked on the code morphing, but he wasn't one of the execs in this first round of questions. Still, he was clearly on people's minds. Almost immediately a reporter asked what Linus's role was at Transmeta, and then Boardwatch's Thom Stark drew a laugh when he asked when Transmeta would open source the code morphing software. (Since it's considered part of the chip's intellectual property, they probably won't.) And Mark from Linux Journal asked why everything had been so tightly guarded, arguing "There's no demand for secrecy."
Ditzel's answer was that he'd learned the difference between hype and buzz. ("Buzz is when you're quiet and someone else talks about you.")
Rob Bedichek told me later they were proud to have not made promises until they had something to show -- and David agreed. "You've heard what we have here. Today." Right before lunch, Rob remembered that it had been like working on the Manhattan Project. "You don't talk."
The audience wasn't easy. Two back-to-back questions raised the issue of benchmarks (which are answered extensively on Transmeta's Web site) and PC Week asked where their OEM's were. But Ditzel did a good job fielding the questions. He stressed that this announcement had intentionally left out OEM's, to focus attention on the chip itself -- and VP of Marketing Jim Chapman joked that anyways, "I don't think 'contract' is a germane word in the PC industry."
In fact, Ditzel was really building up momentum. I asked him what had happened in early 1998 -- when he was quoted as saying "We had a major change in direction a few months ago, and that has slowed us down a bit." His immediate answer drew applause, and probably the biggest laugh of the morning. "That was just something to throw off reporters.
I'm not sure if he was referring to the same period, but when Linus came on later he mentioned that the first chip didn't perform as well as they'd hoped. But thanks to the code morphing software, "one of the advantages is being able to change the way the chip works..." After some early bugs, "We were able to tell our translation software: Don't do that." He pointed out the chip could easily handle something like the Pentium's famous long-division bug. "Maybe we will have a bug -- but at least we can fix it."
Anyway, at this point, Ditzel was building up so much momentum that the next question was just, "Ask the President to say something." (Mark Allen had been introduced as the new president and CEO for Transmeta, hired just two weeks earlier.) There was a laugh when Ditzel aced the question about expected chip volume. (Was it hundreds of thousands or millions? "Yes.") Chris DiBona asked about the size of the marketing and sales organization (25 people) and as things were wrapping up, someone asked the obvious question about running Windows: does Crusoe *improve* the stability? Ditzel's answer? "If you get a blue screen on another chip, we'll reproduce that faithfully."
Later they brought out Linus, Bill Roses from the code morphing division, Doug Laird again, and three other technicians for the "Engineering Press Conference" -- but during the break, I talked to Rob Bedichek some more. "I'm totally pumped, totally pumped," he said. "This is a big mountain to climb." So how did they do it? "With an unbelieveable team. And an unbelieveable amount of money." (I said I'd heard $100 million, and he said "Well north of that.") Reporters were everywhere -- mulling in clusters out of the rain.
"What do you think of this stuff?" I heard one ask another.
"I think they fixated on a market that's not being well-served."
One of the first questions in the Engineering Press Conference was for Linus, about the mobile Linux operating system that kept coming up in the presentation. It's a "small distribution to give to OEM's so they could have something to run with....not a Transmeta Linux, but more of a vehicle for supporting OEM's." (Rob told me later, "We recompiled Linux for our machine. There's no advantage!") Later Linus added that "It looks a lot better this week than it did last week," and that it "needs some work..." ("Like the chip, we're not releasing anything until it's ready.") Naturally, he specified that it will be Open Source. Someone asked him if his Transmeta job would affect kernel development. "My interests have always affected kernel development," he pointed out. "That's not gonna change."
Linus also talked about how much he liked mobile computing, saying he loves his Gateway but that it takes forever to boot. When asked about how he'd decided to come to work for Transmeta, he described the presentation Transmeta had given him. "I went back to the hotel room and I thought, 'These people are crazy.' And that was a positive reaction. Despite the simulations they showed him "at glacial speed," Linus wanted to work for "a company that does something for and something interesting."
So what were the other job offers that he'd had? Linux companies, of course, Linus answered, but "I didn't want to polarize the Linux market." And Transmeta is a good solution. "We were a chip company where Linux is part of a much larger strategy."
Then he asked the reporters, "Do you have questions for someone else?" (No real surprises; except Bill Roses conceding that Mac compatibility was "theoretically possible.")
When it was over, reporters milled around for the free lunch or crowded into the next building to play with the demo equipment. Basically it was boxes showing the Crusoe chip's ability to run existing software. (There was a Windows 2000 box running Office 2000, next to a Linux box running Quake) and some blue laptops in front of cards that said things like "Ultralight Mobile". But towards the end Transmeta VP of Software Engineering Colin Hunter did show me a neat WebPad using Transmeta boards and software and IDEO mechanicals which let you plug-in attachments for games and cameras.
And with that, as the press release said, "Transmeta breaks the silence."
I'm wondering about emulator programming.. Linus said something about "emulators on steroids". From the various comments, can anyone tell if the processor instruction can be dynamic, done in user space? ie can I pop open a MacOS/ppc vm and have it get the cpu instructions while I run another host os a-la VMWare?
MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.com/news/358517.asp
ZDNet: http
CNN: http://www.cnn. com/2000/TECH/computing/01/19/crusoe1.idg/index.h
BTW, Arstechnica is promising an in-depth look at the CPU later today from their CPU expert.
Intel must be collectively quivering in their proverbial shoes after this conference. After watching and listening, I am wondering, are we seeing the Next Great Innovation(tm) in processors? The paradigm that Transmeta has created with Crusoe is so different, I have the feeling I was watching a new chapter of the history of computing being written before my very eyes.
What is does under the hood, between it's translation of instructions and its optimization of the actual code (profiling on the fly), is phenomenal.
This Crusoe information is all very incorrect. I can't believe Slashdot was so badly misled. If you go here (http://www.nitrozac.com), you'll see what tech-savvy readers have known for months: Transmeta is building a multi-story abacus. In fact, I thought it was unveiled a month or two ago, but mysteriously disappeared.
I appologize if this has already been addressed. Alas, my connection to slashdot is poor and it took forever to bring up the reply page.
I see that this processor comes in two versions with different Mhz, but what does that actually mean in real world performance? What is a 700Mhz or 400Mhz Crusoe chip equivalent to? As we all
know, the Mhz rating does not mean everything.
-OT (bogomips for everyone!)
So now that mobile Linux has been demoed to the world, when is Linus going to release the source? I didn't hear any mention of it during the webcast (although I had to leave part way through). And I guess the other question is, is this a kernel fork in progress, or is it a common kernel with what we've been seeing in development right now?
Hotnutz.com
Linus really didn't have a choice when you think about it. If he'd ever said 'Yes, what I do for Transmeta is Linux-based.' It would not have been very hard to conjecture what he really was doing.
Think about it. If it's x86 compatible, what does he need to do? Combine the knowledge that he's doing 'something' with the knowledge that it's portable/embedded/low-power, and right there you've got a pretty good picture of the market Transmeta is going for; other's could have moved to cut them off at the pass.
So he *had* to say that his job wasn't Linux-related. To do otherwise would have been to tip Transmeta's hand.
He did give us enough clues, though. In every interview I've read in the last 9 months, he's mentioned how interested he was in the embedded market, and how cool it would be to see Linux going in that direction.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
rogerbo wrote: So if they don't release code morphing software for PPC, or MIPS or SPARC or ALPHA then you're SOL, you can't write it. And may also be difficult or impossible to write a native version of linux.
Linus said that they explicitly decided against doing a native version of Linux for the Crusoe. The whole idea of Crusoe is to keep you from having to recompile while still letting you take advantage of advances in the underlying CPU architecture. Nobody should want a native Crusoe application, because when a new Crusoe comes out with different instructions or whatever, you'll have to recompile. As much as I hate the phrase, this is really a paradigm shift in processor and OS technology.
The lack of a SPARC or Alpha or PPC morphing layer is probably more a pragmatic decision on Transmeta's part. They can't do it all (right away). They didn't rule out a morphing implementation for PPC, Sparc, etc., but they get the most bang for their buck from doing the x86 first.
A question: because of the Crusoe code morphing technology does this mean that we could program it to translate Java byte code into the Crusoe VLIW instruction set and get a hardware speed JVM? That would be sweet...
Hotnutz.com
Been in development for some time, but secretly. (Didn't hear a word from Sun until it was practically complete)
Has the idea of trying to remove backwards compatability hardware problems and issues. (Crusoe with code morphing, MAJC with Java). This makes it much easier to really optimise for each generation.
VLIW type design. Sounds like Crusoe is fixed 128bit - like most designs. MAJC is variable - 32-128.
low power embedded markets. However Sun is more "embedded" than low power (MAJC 5200 is 15W @ 500MHz), but Sun are going for some pretty damn serious performance - eats mutliple MPEG2 streams for breakfast, 100 voice of IP channels at once, or 50-90M triangles/sec for 3D lighting/transform etc - the PlayStation 2 "Emotion Engine" is a similar product (in terms of performance, power, cost) but is rather more conventional.
Both using IBM fab. Both 0.22 initially, and 0.18 later. (Sun are using copper interconnects, I guess Crusoe is too)
The point about doing benchmarks for the Crusoe discussed in the annoucement is quite apt too - with Java HotSpot, the longer you run it for, the faster it gets. Normally, you use a real application for minutes or hours, but most current benchmarks don't run that long, so isn't quite so "fair".
However, Crusoe beat MAJC to being fabbed and sampled. (MAJC should have "taped out" by now, though no official annoucement yet)
Different markets (MAJC doesn't execute x86 for one, but maybe they could add it later...), though there is some overlap - I think both are going to be very interesting to watch. Both bring some interesting new ideas and applications of things.
Some architectural differences: Crusoe could do just about any instruction set "directly" through code morphing - you'd just have to code it. However, don't expect them to do many as it would be a huge amount of work for each instruction set. They can also do more than one at a time. Though MAJC is not a Java bytecode executor (and you could port Linux to it as easily as a typical RISC CPU) it only does it's instruction set. They hope to use Java to make things more "portable", which is a lot harder than the code morphing techinique which is basically transparant. Not much details has been given about the Crusoe engine, so it's hard to compare, but it doesn't yet seem like it has hardware/vertical threading support, or chip level multiprocessing support (more than one CPU core on one chip), for example.
MAJC does have this one thing which similar in terms of complexity and mixing hardware/software though. When running a JVM, you can use a mode called STM (Space Time Computing) which uses more than one CPU to speed up a single threaded Java app (using some interesting thread speculation techniques), which like the Crusoe code morphing engine, is transpart - you don't need to compi
Will this chip have the same hard time to enter the market?
Probably not. The Athlon is a fine CPU, but it's advantages over PIII are not huge (reletivly speaking).
Crusoe on the other hand isn't that fast (but really, 500Mhz equiv. isn't all that slow either), but it's power consumption is 1/35 that of PIII. That translates DIRECTLY into battery life which has been the bane of laptops from the beginning. Add in to that that a fan isn't needed and you really have something. The lack of a fan is more significant than it seems. Lack of fan means lack of vent holes (with good heatsink technique) which means a sealed case that can tolerate wet conditions MUCH better than a laptop with a fan.
It opens the door to a new class of handheld device. The PalmVII is great (I use one myself), but compared to the Crusoe, it's CPU is absolutely anemic. So in it's niche (tiny laptops and handhelds), it really is tremendously better than the competition.
Power consumption of the chip is lower, but power consumption of the chip is only 20-30% of a notebook, limiting the value of this "revolution."
Further power reductions require either A) giving up a hard disk (aka Linux in ROMs) or B) integrating more than just the CPU and chipset (what about 2D/3D just for starters, not to mention sound, fast ethernet, modem, wireless etc.; note that some of these require analog circuitry not just digital and pinouts start getting complicated)
Sure, Intel's SpeedStep power circuitry is less dynamic, more of a step-function static approach to power management. But is it good enough? If not, will the next generation of their technology in 2-3 years be good enough? Not much of a market window here, in the big scheme of things. Remember, Intel only loses when CPU power is an issue; it can pursue the same no-hard-disk and system-on-a-chip approaches as Transmeta. No patents there.
In terms of integrating 3D, Intel has a huge lead over Transmeta in terms of patent licensing and technology development.
So what about Transmeta in the embedded space, a la cell-phones? This appears to be a backup strategy not articulated yet for one simple reason: the TM processors are still less power-efficient than, say, StrongARM.
Did I mention the difficulties Transmeta would have keeping up with Intel's clock rates and performance? There's not a clear win here today, and this is only going to get worse before it gets better. It's relatively easy to release one innovative product that hits the market sweet spot once; it takes a totally different set of skills to keep up development of an ongoing stream of products that is always competitive with what's in the market. You can see this in the 3D space over the last four years, and AMD also illustrates the ups and downs of playing challenger.
Wireless internet is cool, but I find it hard to be optimistic about the per-month pricing over the next 3 years at reasonable bandwidth rates attracting serious (5+ million) consumers. Guys putting up towers and satellites are the bottleneck here, as is the degree of competition.
;-)
This is all very innovative, and perhaps Transmeta OEMs will sell a few million units of handheld notebook/palmtops, with Transmeta gaining reasonable market share over the short term, IPO'ing to incredible hype, and three years from now realizing that well, they don't have the market position needed to really compete when Intel puts the squeeze on. Their technology value-add that I've seen is too slim that it can't be embraced and extended by some means. I see enough value add for them to survive, to live well and cash in on some sweet stock options, but I don't see them becoming a big or significant player 5-10 years out. Long term, well after the IPO and honeymoon period are over, they only make sense combined with someone like AMD with a much broader product line and established consumer reputation.
How's that for thought provoking?
--LP
Being one of a few (if not the only) negative poster, I'm likely to get branded (and moderated) as a troll/flamebaiter, but please hear me out...
I'm wondering if I watched the same presentation as the rest of the posters here... Deitzel and co. effectively skirted the performance/Mhz question, which says to me that they don't have much to brag about in the performance area, otherwise- They would've bragged about performance/Mhz.
I could've sworn I was watching an Microsoft/Apple/Intel love-in/press-conference at times. A quote of note: "Crusoe will be a low power internet platform for the future". What the fsck does that mean? There was lots of 'marchitecure', but little in the way of hard performance numbers.
Looks like Transmeta's smartest move was to hire Linus, 'cause the whole of Slashdot is believing the (and feeding) the hype without knowing all the facts.
There's an interesting double-standard on slashdot... Announced and unshipping products that are !linux are vaporware, yet announced and unshipping products that Linus smiles on are "the next big thing" and "A new paradigm in computing".
And they say Mac advocates are fanatics...
-t
And here is an example (quote from the datasheet for the 400MHz processor):
Other than having execution hardware for logical, arithmetic, shift, and floating point instructions, as in conventional processors, the Crusoe Processor has very distinctive features from traditional x86 designs. To ease the translation process from x86 to the core VLIW instruction set, the hardware generates the same condition codes as conven-tional x86 processors and operates on the same 80-bit floating point numbers. Also, the Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB) has the same protection bits and address mapping as x86 processors. The software component of this solution is used to emulate all other features of the x86 architecture.
So all the people that were thinking about 128-bit floats are SOL. I think that emulating non-x86 architectures on Crusoe is going to be possible, but noticeably harder and slower than x86.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The implication that they consider the low level stuff part of this their business, and, as you suggest, the "cash cow." It is part of their "competitive advantage" to be able to do that which nobody else can, which is to customize the processors in this way.
ON THE OTHER HAND. Not giving out the underlying instruction set means that they never have to apologize if they change the instruction set. They claimed that there were different instruction sets for the 3120 and 5400 models; if that be the case, it would be no surprise at all if later models are different again. If people are interactive via "middleware" instruction sets, then all Transmeta need do is to make sure that the microcode continues to support the "middleware," whether that be IA-32 or JVM.
Vision for the Future.
There is a really cool thing that this offers... Wouldn't it be a neat idea if Linus were to create what we might call Linus' Favorite Instruction Set, with all the features that he wishes there were to make Linux as fast and robust as possible?
Alternatively, the Lisp Machine people might find it a slick idea if Transmeta provided microcode to provide a Lisp-oriented instruction set that (notably) provides a really tightly microcoded set of garbage collector instructions. That would let them both benefit from MHz enhancements as well as from generational enhancements, perhaps simultaneously having some IA-32 emulation going on so that they have a virtual machine alongside providing PC compatibility services...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
"It's the code-morphing that makes it compatible right? Or is there some deeper compatibility at the hardware level?"
:-) This is the reprogrammible CPU we've all secretly lusted after... And because its core is VLIW, I hope we can leave behind those "[R|C]ISC is better" flamewars (which were really pathetic). The VLIW core is also very much simpler in design and cleaner (asthetically speaking) than either CISC or RISC. This is why the chip can be so cheap for the speeds they get, why it's so cool (pun), and why it uses so little power (more so inconjuntion with their translator).
Unlike the PIII or K7, which have special microhardware to translate 32-bit x86 ISA to the 32-bit RISC internal cores, the Crusoe uses a hybrid hardware/software module (patenteded, et all) that translates the 32-bit x86 ISA into 128-bit VLIW core. The fact it's in software allows them to apply RAD techniques to their translation code, which is a big win, allows them to reconfigure the hardware based on the programs running for optimal power consumption, and allows software overclocking
"Is there any reason to believe that applications written natively for this would be able to avoid the code-morphing layer and run even faster?"
Nope. Unlike the K7 and PIII, the translation is important to the process. For performance, they likely have the translator units running at a fast enough speed that the VLIW core is kept as full as if it didn't have a translator unit. And without the translator unit, you'd have to spend a few more man years designing a new BIOS, chipset, etc, that understand VLIW, as well as a new instruction fetching unit. It's easier to support the x86 ISA (which everyone supports), and stick with the design they have now. Besides, as they have pointed out, the purpose is to have a reliable low power CPU, not an "oh my god, I came it was so fast!" processor. This is best accomplished with a smart translator that is software reconfigurable around a simple VLIW core.
This doesn't stop the idea of a very high performance VLIW core desktop machine, which is what Intel is lusting after with its Merced. Luckily, the Cursoe seems a lower-level version of the Merced, which should stop any Intel strangehold on the VLIW market. And when AMD extends the x86 ISA with 64-bit instructions, your Cursusoe from the ol' year 2000 will be able to handle it. Flexbile; extensible; cheap -- I like it.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Emulating CISC based hardware is vastly easier than achieving acceptable performance emulating RISC based hardware. With CISC based hardware, each instruction does a lot, and might take several clock ticks to execute. The Transmeta emulator can come along and translate the instruction into equivalent Crusoe instructions, and achieve roughly comparable performance. This is why PC emulators can be run on PowerPC hardware, and why the MacOS's 68k CISC emulator was so successful for running old applications on PowerPC based Macintosh's.
RISC emulation is vastly different. Each instruction doesn't do a whole lot, but runs extremely fast. So, basically, to emulate a RISC processor, you have to translate each instruction into one or more Curose instructions that don't benefit from RISC hardware's pipelining and other efficiencies. You're going to end up with a vastly slower PC.
Also, this chip will not be able to emulate multimedia enhancements like 3DNow or the G4's velocity engine as fast as the native version. These chips are optimized to run the special instructions in a highly efficient and parallel manner. The multimedia enhancements in hardware basically utilize almost all the hardware technology that Transmeta has in their chip, and tehy don't have the overhead of translating intructions before being able to execute them. The Transmeta chip's software layer simply won't do as good a job as dedicated vector processing units.
Please remember that 700mhz doesn't mean shit. You need to know how fast the processor actually runs x86 software, not how fast it runs the Crusoe transcoding software. Its the same with all emulators. Would you rush out and buy a Macintosh with a hypothetical G4 chip running at 1GHZ that only emulated x86 software? Of course not! You'd know that a x86 native processor running at 700mhz would probably be faster.
Sig goes here
It seems hard to believe that they'll get twice as much battery life as existing laptops. I'm no expert, but I'd say that the screen, HDD, DVD drive, etc waste much more energy than the microprocessor. Anybody that knows this stuff cares to give his opinion?
Actually, if you read their web site, Transmeta gave their "opinion" on this right here. Essentially, the gist of it is that the battery savings are quite significant, even on one of those giant laptops with the 15" screens and the DVD players, and even while playing a DVD in software (which, because it requires a nearly constant (and rather hefty) level of CPU power, can't take much advantage of their technology which dynamically scales down power usage and voltage to meet the current system needs).
Basically, according to the tables on the above page, the worst-case for a Crusoe processor--running soft DVD (2 watts used in CPU + Northbridge) on a bigass notebook (8 watts)--gives 3.2 hours battery life. IIRC, one of those new G3's (and remember, a G3 consumes *way* less power than any (native) x86 chip) can barely manage an hour and a half.
Plus, they're not even taking into account the fact that unlike any other notebook on the planet, these suckers don't need a fan; that should be reflected in the 8 watt system overhead, but isn't. (Not sure how much power a fan takes, but it has to be significant.)
Now...in the normal case, in which the CPU is at full throttle only a little bit of the time, then Crusoe starts to clean up. For one thing, as they point out, traditional notebooks try to conserve power by just shutting off the CPU when it's not being used. The problem with this is it doesn't help the normal case when it's being used only a little bit, and it adds a noticable delay while it gets switched on again, which for most users is a lot more important than its peak speed anyways. The T5400 (the especially badass one that's not coming out until the summer) gets around this by scaling CPU power and voltage to meet current needs--and it shows.
Witness their mobile benchmark report [note: 116k pdf], based on a new benchmarking methodology they invented (read up on it he re [note: 93k pdf]) which:
1) mirrors actual use--i.e. doesn't run full throttle all the time, which almost never happens under normal use, especially for a notebook
2) includes metrics for energy efficiency--that is, it reports not just work/time, but work/WattHour and work/time/WattHour.
For those who don't want to check it out, the result is that across 6 tests (operating system load, system idle, Office 2000, web browsing, mp3 playback, and soft DVD playback) comparing the T5400 to a P3 500, the Crusoe processor was:
95.3% as fast (yeah, this includes the "system idle" test, which is a bit of a cheap freebie in this category) [note--this is just my straight average of the 6 categories, which is absolutely unmathematically correct, but oh well]
409.2% as efficient in terms of work/Watt-hour
395.3% as efficient in terms of work/time/watt-hour.
All in all, pretty damn impressive. And it's worth noting that it's over 6 times as efficient in the system idle test--which is what your system probably does most anyways.
Of course, this only measures the power drained by the CPU+NG, and not the screen, HD, etc. But...I have no trouble believing that a CPU that's 4 times as efficient under normal use will give 2 times the overall battery power.
I gotta go now, but the point of all this rambling is, this chip is pretty damn neat. I'm impressed.
"since it is maintaining compatability with x86 instruction sets, it will always follow Intel's lead (and require Intel to continue leading) mainstream chip technology."
:-)
:-)
This is like saying that because GM is making cars, they have to follow Ford's lead in how to make them. The x86 ISA is pretty much developed right now, with instructions for anything you'd care to do in silicon (or emulation). Since Intel has said that their next proc is VLIW, it looks like TransMeta's VLIW proc is leading them...
"It will never run as fast as a native x86 chip would (because it must execute extra instructions). Of course, being smaller and independent to the hardware, these chips may be made significantly faster (clock-wise) than mainstream CISC/RISC chips and comparatively match performance. But not yet."
The purpose was never performance, or the masturbatory RISC/CISC debate stuff. Its purpose is to provide good performance for insanely low levels of power consumption.
"No mention was made regarding the connection to the Internet...that was just assumed to be there. But I have yet to hear about any affordable and sufficiently fast connection via mobile unit... How will they address this, or will they just leave it up to other companies to solve this general problem?"
I think you are refering to the fact that the translation units can be upgraded via software. Software which comes over the internet
"However, Linux does not have a standards-conforming browser (i.e. IE) available until Mozilla is complete. "
(sarcasm in good humour)
Christ, what've I been running? Jeez, I guess it was just Bill himself pushing a cloaked IE through my net connection onto my desktop, as I can't be running something that's not been released..
(/sarcasm in good humour)
This will make a very nice "web panel" device, like the one Cyrix promoters were pushing.. I know I'd love to replace my 486 X terminal with a wireless laptop display
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You can run quake 3 in software mode under mesa as you say at about 3 frames per second.
But you're missing something here. This is transmeta we're talking about and that was Dave Taylor, the SAME dave taylor that once leaked a document onto usenet ranting about the inferiority of hardware graphics accelerators and that what he really wanted was a generic parallel processing chip that could do arbitary transforms.
(anyone got the link to that usenet posting on deja that dave taylor tried to cancel?)
GEE, a lot like the crusoe chip can do?
Isn't it feasible that they have put hooks into their code morphing software that optimises specially for 3d transforms and mesa/opengl?
Especially in the linux version? Where they have all the source code to linux and mesa?
Hmm, what fancy optimisations could those clever brains come up with.
Maybe those transmeta laptops WON'T need 3d accelerator ships?
And it would completely defeat the purpose of a low power laptop to put a big,hot,power sucking 3d chip in it. So I'm assuming that demo of quake3 they showed WAS running in software mode.
Someone prove me wrong?
- Company XYZ patents software, they are denounced by the "community" as greedy profiteers
- Transmeta patents software-morphing and they are revolutionary geniuses
- Company XYZ cracks down on trademark use in domains and is demonized by the "community"
- Linus cracks down on the use of "Linux" in domains he doesn't "approve" and he's a God
- Company XYZ produces a closed source OS that gains 95% market share and they are considered the devil by the "community"
- Transmeta produces a closed source emulation software and they are the holy grail
How ironic indeed.