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OEMs Jump Onto Transmeta Bandwagon
Scooter writes "News.com is reporting that Diamond Multimedia has announced a Web-Pad product based on Transmeta's 3120 processor. The report also mentions that NEC, and possibly a dozen other companies are investigating similar possibilities. It's nice to see things taking shape for Crusoe so quickly. " For more details on the chip itself, check out our recent story.S3 has also announced development work that will be done with Transmeta. They are working on a "Linux-based Internet appliance".
I wouldn't be surprised to hear a lot more companies start offering Crusoe-based systems over the next few days or weeks. I also expect to start seeing major chip manufacturers slash prices, to avoid having their markets vanish.
(What's the point in maintaining multiple product lines, with different processors, if the Crusoe will do the job of all of them? It's much cheaper to use a standard one-size-fits-all package, and tailor it with software patches.)
Depending on the performance of the Crusoe in the field, expect the Itanium (whenever it actually gets released) to sell for only a fraction of what Intel usually try to fleece off it's customers for new releases. If they don't, it's dead. It's going to be slower than a P3, anyway, and companies are going to start asking if it's not better to just upgrade to the Crusoe instead.
I imagine the Alpha (horribly overpriced as it is) to take a knock from this, too. The ARM and the Sparc should be OK, as they're both RISC (so will be faster) and they're not -too- outrageously priced.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I don't want a "webpad" with a pen interface. I want a wireless, diskless laptop running as an X terminal to my PC. Think about it:
-Runs on Crusoe so it is quiet, cool, light
-no disk so it is even quiter, cooler and lighter AND there's no need to sync with the mothership AND it is more robust (HD's are delicate and often fail)
Obviously this is fairly useless once I leave the house (until wireless Internet gets popular), but so what? I'm sick of being stuck in one location while I'm browsing/programming/reading-docs/looking-at-porn
Furthermore, with some intelligent design you could even get rid of the keyboard. Put 8 buttons on the back of an LCD screen (4 on left and 4 on right). Your fingers would rest on these keys as you hold the pad. Pressing them in "chords" causes characters to appear on the screen--just like typing only using more than one finger at a time. Even using only 2 fingers at a time you get 256 different characters.
BTW, if this device is ever patented, the above is "prior art"....
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If Diamond indeed ships out a Webpad running Mobile Linux (their page lacks any press releases at this point), I think they surely deserve some sort of Hypocracy Award, if not an annual award than a 'Lifetime Acceivement' award. It would be truely ironic for a company to ship a webpad that only runs linux, after years and years of outright denying specs for things as trivial as the Rio uploading code (claiming it was "valuable intellectual property") to things like specs/help on video card drivers (based on S3 chips, the big help was needed because Diamond deviated in such fscked-up ways from the reference design).
;-)
Yes, Diamond deserves a nice trophy anyways, but if they really plan to ship an entire computer now (mobile or not) running the linux operating sytem when they have yet to support a single project under linux.. well, let me just say it is too early in the morning for me to fully imagine what the figurine at the top of the trophy should look like, and what it will be doing
I was REALLY excited about the Crusoe chip when speculation first arose that it would be able to run executables from multiple hardware platforms. Then came the speculation that Crusoe would be aimed at the mobile market (I lose 50% interest right here).
Now that Transmeta has made their announcement, I have no real interest left in it. They've done a nice job of diverting attention to it's power consumption, and that's about it. It's x86 compatible...so what? It's theoretically compatible with lot's of stuff, so pony up. I wouldn't buy one of these JUST because it's not Intel (I don't use PDA stuff, so that's not a big drawing point for me). My MAIN interest was in being able to run applications written for Apple computers, or Sun workstations. And then you have the benchmarks...nice fluff work there. Combining their low power consumption (see, here it is again) with performance doesn't even come CLOSE to giving a fair representation of how it stacks up against a comparably clocked Intel or AMD chip.
And of course, the price on those web "appliances" (aren't you sick of that term?) is still too high for what amounts to a big kids toy. You're not going to get any real work done without a keyboard (in most cases) so basically what you are paying for is a $500 - $1000 Rolodex with some added functionality. (And yes, I know, virtual keyboard or whatever they called it. Did you ever try to do any touch typing on the old Atari 400 membrane keyboard? If so, you know my objection here)
I really think notebooks are going to be where Crusoe blooms, if for no other reason than to not melt your lap while your working with it. But is $329 for the 700MHz really any kind of a bargain?
The most exciting feature, for me, of Crusoe is code morphing. Reading the white paper on technology behind the chip (something that *a lot* of posters here should do before posting) got me excited even more.
...(do some stuff with %register)...
Basically, after a piece of code is translated to native code and optimized, it is cached. Next time it is executed, if it's still cached, the already translated and optimized verison executes.
The benefit of this is speed. A lot of people doubt this speed, saying things like "an emulator can't possibly run at 75% speed of the native system", etc. There are two reasons why Crusoe can outperform the native system, one of which is really not apparent and ignored by almost every person that criticizes Crusoe.
The main thing to remember here is that Crusoe has some radical, very different technology decisions.
First, as any experienced software engineer would point out (backed by experimental data), 90% of a program's execution time is spent in 10%(!) percent of its code. What this means is that if ONLY that 10% of the code is optimized, it will speed up 90% of program's execution time. Crusoe's code caching mechanism helps this immensely because as a program runs, these 10% become cached in native code and translation from non-native machine code is done only ONCE.
You may be saying, "So what, in the best case, the program will run almost as fast as the native system, but it simply can't beat the native system." That's where you're wrong.
The second reason is that the software layer not only performs translation, but optimization as well. You may now object that if the original program is optimized by the best optimizers, Crusoe's optimizer can't do better. Well, it can because of Crusoe's architecture. Note that, for example, x86 processors have a small number of registers (which are areas for data stored internally *in* the processor; such data is accessed the *fastest*). Crusoe's VLIW architecture, however, has a lot more registers and its out-of-order pipelining, branch prediction. Also being a very-long-instruction word processor, it executes a lot of small instructions (atoms) in one big full instruction (molecule). Molecules can be executed in parallel (pipelining). Crusoe's optimizer takes advantage of these features, making the translated code use more native registers, instead of accessing normal memory or L1/L2 cache (which are slower) and groups code to be processed in parallel.
Crusoe's optimizer performs really aggressive optmiziation. Perhaps the neatest feature is how Crusoe handles aliasing. Here's some pseudo-assembler code that loads from the same memory location twice:
load from %X to %register
store %anotherregister to %Y
load from %X to %register
add %register and something else
etc.
This is the tightest optmiziation a compiler can perform. The compiler can't eliminate the second load operation to the register because %Y may be an alias for %X (that is, %Y may point to the same memory location as %X). Such aliases come up rarely, but they can come up, and so the compiler can't risk eliminating the second load instruction because it can't predict whether %X is an alias for the %Y. Nobody can, not even the processor.
Crusoe takes a radically different approach in this situation. Its optimizer ELIMINATES the second load operation, assuming that %Y is not an alias for %X. However, in case it is, it marks an internal bit that protects %X from being overwritten by the store instruction. So the code that one ends up with doesn't have that load instruction and when the case of %Y being an alias for %X does happen, it simply generates the extra load instruction on the fly.
This may seem like an insignificant optimization, but in reality, it can be quite significant since things such as these happen in programs very often (and often %Y ends up being not an alias for %X). Elimination of extra loads permits better pipelining (more code executed in parallel), and an extra load may take quite a bit of time if the load has to be done from the memory.
There are a whole bunch of cool other things about Crusoe's technology which makes it a great all-around processor.
So, what this means is that thanks to the revolutionary architecture, Crusoe's optimizer can optimize that 10% BEYOND the original and actually run faster.
Users of computationally-intensive programs will especially benefit from this. For example, a 3d ray tracing program spends a lot of time in the small, tight rendering code. Having that optimized so well by the processor can have a significant effect.
Crusoe also uses filtering techniques to avoid caching code that is executed once-an-hour (thereby preserving translated native often-executed code in the cache as long as possible).
As the website mentions, most benchmarks only measure a bunch of tasks done in 10 or 20 minutes. The website asks: do you really repetitively do 10 different tasks on your word processor for half-hour or do you actually sit in front of a processor and type most of the time? This is indeed a valid rhetorical question.
Most benchmarks are too short to let Crusoe speed things up as much as possible.
Although I don't like the "mobility features" that Transmeta keeps pushing every other sentence (damn marketing) and I don't like the fact that their benchmarks mix performance with "mobility features" (even though there is some validity in doing tat), I think that Crusoe is a very exciting technology and wish I had one.
Stop thinking in terms of megahertz. As processor technology gets more advanced, all these things stop mattering. In one app, your 700Mhz AMD may perform much slower, in another it can perform much faster. It's never same speed all the time.