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Intel Responds to Crusoe
spaceorb writes "According to Zdnet, Intel is preparing to do away with the mobile Pentium III in favor of a new chip, codenamed Northwood, in 2001. Northwood is based on Intel's next generation 32 bit chip Williamette, which will mark the beginning of their transition to 0.13 micron. Also briefly noted in the article is the mobile Athlon. "
The representative didn't talk at all about the Crusoe or ANY competition, but talked about the features of the NEW Mobile Pentium III, such as SpeedStep technology, which adjusts the processor's clock speed on the fly to conserve power (ala LongRun), as well as the new Mobile Pentium III's socket, heat dissipation, etc.
While Intel training events aren't uncommon, a MANDATORY one never happens. This is the first MANDATORY training that there ever has been. My guess is, Intel got with the retailers, and said "Look, we have to educate the retail workforce on why the Pentium III is the ONLY choice for any computer." (They emphasized that a LOT, mind you.) They touted things like Intel's experience in the microprocessor field, their well known market share, the Intel "name", and the Intel Inside marketing campaign. A lot was fluff, but there was tech talk too. (Talk about Coppermine, etc. No mention of this "Northwood" though, but I'd imagine it's going to rip off some features of the Crusoe.)
Just some speculattion on my part.
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I'm running out of the house, so i didn't read the article, or any other comments. But upon reading the /. post, this was my first thought: seeing how Intel plans this processor in about a year, its a good thing Transmeta kept Crusoe so secret until it was able to ship. This way, crusoe has a chance to establish itself in the embedded and mobile market before Intel can even get a competitor injected in.
-- My Sig is a P228.
The cars-laptops analogy is interesting. However, the question is not necessarily pure speed vs. pure efficiency. To pursue the car analogy further, the Geo Metros and other ultra-efficient cars were not commercially successful because the same design that produced ultra-efficiency also caused the performance to drop below the acceptable threshold of most consumers. Rather than really small cars that could get 50mpg, consumers decided that 30-40mpg cars with more power were more desirable. It still remains to be seen whether Crusoe-based laptops will be in the Geo Metro class or the more successful Civic/Corolla class.
Another consideration is the growing trend of business laptop users using their laptops as their primary computer. Whereas in the past, laptops were used mostly for their mobility and more demanding tasks were executed on more powerful desktops, there is a growing shift to using a single laptop in a docking station. Such machines must not only be efficient in a mobile mode, but performance must rival desktops. This trend will only grow and will only drive up the minimum acceptable performance threshold for laptops.
....nothing. No mention of Crusoe anywhere in the article, no mention that the Transmeta announcement had anything to do with Intel rushing this product to ship..
/. has Transmeta on the brain. ANy announcement of a new chip wil be couched as a "response to the Crusoe", which as everyone knows, must be the do-all, be-all, and end-all chip.
In other words,
Sheesh.
No mention in this article of specially reduced power consumption (beyond normal mobile chips) so I find it hard to believe that this chip will be able to outcompete the Crusoe. I don't know if the Crusoe has SMP support but if it did you should easily be able to beat the intel chips on speed as well by putting four of them in a laptop with still lower power consumption.
That raises an interesting question: Can the kind of technology which lets Transmeta optimize instruction translation on the fly be used to optimize the execution of single processer code on a dual procesor system? Just like in the translation case we would keep a software table but instead of most used instructions/jumps it would be of independent blocks of code.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
Golddang it, I like PCs, but when you need to do graphics or 3D stuff, Apples are looking pretty good...
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
I hate to rain on your metaphor, but if it holds out things look bad for Transmeta. Detroit ended up fighting back against little efficient Japanese cars with big gas-guzzling SUV's, convincing people that yes, they really do need the kitchen sink on the road. (Also, these beasts get all the attention because margins are higher).
If your metaphor holds, then all Intel has to do is a) continue to invent new multimedia instruction sets; and b) hope that a software company that lives on such feeping creatures remains dominant. Transmeta wouldn't be able to keep up.
Of course, as someone who will soon be running my laptop on pure solar power, I hope that this doesn't happen...
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
You missed the point. Intel is timing this ANNOUNCEMENT to chip away at some of the glow around Transmeta. Yes, they likely have had this in the pipeline forever, but they also almost certainly rushed the announcement out the door after the Transmeta pess conference.
Intel needs to be scared by Transmeta. If they're not, they are doing their shareholders a disservice.
A couple of people have said that this Intel announcement has nothing to do with Crusoe. I will tell you now why it does. It is the fact that Intel is putting a chip on the market that overlaps some of what the Crusoe is supposed to accomplish. The terms that clearly shout "Crusoe" are 'heat-dissapation' and 'low-power consumption'. This is Intel's way of trying to say that no-one needs to buy or use a Crusoe processor. The one problem they have is that the secrecy of Transmeta allowed the Crusoe to stun Intel when they were taking their sweet time to make advances on the problems that the Crusoe chips confront. Thus, Transmeta has a year to get OEM's and companies behind the Cursoe chips. Also, they have the time to start on the next generation of Crusoe chips that might extend the foothold that they have gained on the mobile processor market. All this should have been obvious.....
Ciao
nahtanoj
'lightweight low power chip that's good enough but not a real performer' it will be what accountants stick people with when they're not allowed to make a choice. When that perception becomes predominant (if it does, I should say) then you'll find people getting STUCK with Transmeta based gear, and wishing they had Intel.
It's probably not that much of a problem. The current Transmeta chips are close to the top performers in speed. Many people prefer to buy one less than top speed anyway to take advantage of the large dropoff in price. The price/performance and absolute performance of the Transmeta chips is in that ballpark.
Intel says 'We are planning on bringing out a new chip that's faster and has lower power consumption, to replace our current mobile PIII laptop chips, it might run at 1Ghz'
And the Crusoe is *already* out, and has amazingly low power requirements.
Now, I'm not saying intel isn't capable of bringing out a strong competitor.. but they don't have it yet...
The VHS comparison is useless. It was a catch 22. Withtou Betamax players, you couldn't watch beta tapes. WIthotu a market of people with betamax players, nobody can economically produce tapes.
This is not the same thing in any way. Systems based on crusoe will run normal, desktop software. IT's x86. They have no barrier to entry in that respect.
Companies *everywhere* will give them a good hard look when they are looking at an embedded/mobile product. The advantages are huge. People make PDA's on non-x86 gear because x86 chips are power hogs. WinCE isn't the naswer, WinCE sucks.
It's a code name, and Intel have been using river names from Northern California and Oregon as product code names for a while (Klamath, for the first Pentium II; Deschutes, for the first PII rev after that; Merced, which I find less of a pretentious name than "Itanium"; and probably others. I don't know whether they've branched out from Northern California and Oregion, and named "Coppermine" after the river in Nunavut, or not.)
I don't expect many "latest-greatest-64-bit-only" applications of the sort most people would run on their laptops to come out for a while; I suspect that, for some amount of time, 64-bit apps will primarily be server apps and high-end workstation apps.
As such, doing a 64-bit lower-power processor now might not be the best use of Intel's large-but-finite funds.
Note that Willamette will be a 32-bit processor for desktops and servers as well; when they made the IA-64 announcement Intel indicated that this didn't mean the immediate end of the 32-bit x86 processors - they'd continue to develop them.
IA-64 may eventually replace x86/IA-32, including in the mobile general-purpose computer market, but I don't expect the arrival of Merced or even McKinley to instantly kill x86 (and suspect that 32-bit processors - or even 64-bit processors, e.g. various MIPS processors, running in a fashion that doesn't make much use of the 64-bitness of the processor - will be around for a while in the "embedded" marketplace, including client "appliances").
That's why I said "in Nunavut" and "branched out from California and Oregon"....
The terms that clearly shout "Crusoe" are 'heat-dissapation' and 'low-power consumption'
Hello, those terms shout "mobile processing," not "Crusoe." Those are the two things that notebook makers have been struggling with for years. Just on a lark, I searched News.com for that subject, and turned up this article about that very topic. Wow, Intel must have some top-notch industrial spies on their payroll to have stolen Transmeta's plans way back in 1997!!
Transmeta could really have a field day if they ever decided to sue Intel for stealing their completely original idea that "heat-dissipation" and "low-power consumption" are good for notebook CPUs! Just look at this 1994 Byte article, where those thieving bastards at Intel mention the improvments in their (obviously stolen!) 486DX4 CPU design:
Call the lawyers, call the lawyers, we've got a clear case of trade secret theft on our hands!Damn, it's truly hilarious watching you naïve Linus Torvalds fanboys making asses of yourselves as you slavishly scramble to heap greater and greater praise upon anything with which he's associated.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Well let's look at the facts:
;)
1.transmeta has a one year lead
a.intel releasing chip in 2001+
b.transmeta is here now
2. transmeta chips use little power
a. can run one for a week off a single charge
b. may be able to make 'human motion' chargers,
if motorola chooses to persue - and allow for
wearables to not need a recharge at all
c. most people when asked what they hate most
about their laptop it's power consumtion
3. transmeta code morphing is a larger factor
a. people can run 'appliances', not computers
b. not everyone likes computers, ie mom factor
c. appliances are an open market till this day
4. transmeta chips are cheap compared to intel/amd
------ conspirisy alert for following --------
1. IBM was going to release wearables 1999 july
2. IBM retracted andset new date 2000 july
3. Transmeta chips use IBM copper technology
4. IBM has transmeta listed on PCI and various
venedor m/b parts list
5. Transmeta IBM wearables by this summer?
--- pathetic begging for IBM wearable ------
Someone please get me on IBM test list this time! Bruce-san, I know you'll read this... I love you man, you're my hero - now gimmie gimmie... I'll give weekly reports, all typed up.
We've known about their 130nm process, and we know that all their x86 chips get put into a mobile format. Also, we know that Willamette's core will be release a la the Pentium IV product very late this year.
FWIW, the Willamette is Intel's first new core since the P6 back in the mid 90s, which found itself inside the Pentium Pro, II, III, and Celeron. Rumours and admissions declare the below to be its likely improvements:
The 130nm process basically will decrease the size of the features on the processor. Basically, imagine drawing stuff with a big fat marker, then getting a nice, fine pen. You can make much more detailed drawings, right? Basically same thing here. Benefits of going from 180nm to 130nm process:
-JC
PC News'n'Links
http://www.jc-news.com/pc
They used to be pretty good at delaying the succes of a new product by claiming they would have a better product ready within a few months. but 2001? sjeeezz.... where do they think the mobile market will be by then? Every company that wants to put a cool mobile device on the market should do it now and -thus- should use a transmeta chip. There simply isn't anything else in the high-end mobile processor area right now.
By the time intell releases it's little project it had better be a really kickass powerhouse of the high-MHz/low-power-use kind. I'm selling my intel stocks for now.
Granted, the new Intel chips probably won't be ultra-low power consuming chips like the Crusoe ones, but is that going to matter?
Beta was better than VHS but the VHS crowd was able to get the spin and the edge and got their technology adopted.. Same goes with Windows vs OS/2.
How do we know that Intel won't pull MS like tactics ("If you buy Transmeta chips, we aren't going to sell you P-3's for your desktop boxen") or won't otherwise collaborate with MS to keep Crusoe and its technolgoy from being adopted?
Heaven knows it's in their interest -- if Crusoe can emulate just about any instruction set, it would allow people to install pretty much whatever they pleased on their Laptops or PDAs.. Talk about interoperability.. "Oh, I think I'll run MacOS today, or the new Amiga operating system, or AIX, or.." That is technology that is really geek-cool but suit-frightening. And after the deCSS debacle, I think we can see that suits still have a lot of power in society, and can influence a lot of things (even if just through brute force of lawyering).
On another note, when can I buy a box or palmtop running Crusoe?
There is no mention of either Transmeta or Crusoe in the story, other than in the "related links" section. I don't think any of this was prompted by Transmeta's actions - Intel has this stuff planned out months in advance. Slashdot is just using any chance it gets to hype Transmeta b/c Linus works there.
--
http://gammatron.weblogger.com
After hearing pundit after pundit spelling doom for Trnasmeta because they can't compete with Intel, this is good news. They said Intel isn't worried in the slightest about Crusoe. It doesn't run fast, and no OEMs jumped on the bandwagon.
Now Intel is rushing out a postable chip of thier own. Sounds to me like Intel is worried. They are probably even more worried that the 5400 Crusoe will be out in lapstops by summer. Say evev on best estimates Intel releases Q2 2001. that's almost a full year after Crusoe. I don't think OEMs are going to wait that long. And I think that once OEMs and people use the Crusoe chips, it's going to be a hard sell to go back to Intel. Expecially if they release a PPC emulation layer, and they are all running OS X on their laptops.
Only OEMs that may not jump on the Crusoe bandwagon are the Dells, etc. that have a a HUGE Intel based desktop/server market. Intel may say "if you use those Crusoe chips in your laptops, there maybe a Xeon shortage next month. And how many Xeon systems you have to build next mont? Be a shame to lose them" Being put in situations like that make it hard to choose Transmeta.
Intel is now playing catch-up on two markets now. AMD is releasing faster Athlons as Intel releases faster P3s. Now Transmeta is going afer the mobile market. Both companies do what they are doing better then Intel is right now. And unlike Intel,their chips aren't tied to x86. Althons have a x86 layer themselves, and Transmeta has their code morphing.
It's the begining of the end of the Intel monopoly now. Intel will always be a player, but soon their bark will be worse then their bite, and this Intel monopoly will be over. And maybe once Intel loses it's bite, x86 will just go away, and we all know what dies with x86? Windows. It's a dream isn't it? =)
Like micros~1 missing the internet message in the early 90s, It looks as if Intel has missed the wireless/handheld message and is now trying to catch up with Transmeta and StrongARM.
For the moment, the bulk of the CPU market is still in desktop peecees but that is changing fast.
The only questions is, is Williamette "to little to late"?
_________________________
Yes, I know, that's why I mentioned it.
As much as you hate Intel's and Microsoft's FUD, you've completely bought into Transmeta's FUD. It looks like they've done a tremendous job at freezing the market for laptops among slashdot readers.
They don't have a product yet. Or at least if they did, I didn't see it. I did see "video taped demonstrations" of Crusoe in action. I also saw "video taped demonstrations" of how removing IE would kill Windows.
I'd say, if you need a laptop, go buy your laptop. Crusoe's not going to be that much more advantagous that you should put off your purchase for 6 - 9 months in order to get one. Or at least wait until a somewhat more objective 3rd party takes a look at a system based around the chip before pledging that it's the best thing since slice bread.
All we've heard so far is that Transmeta say's their chip beats Intels chips in terms of power consumption in their controlled environments. That's a far cry for the real world, and it doesn't seem to take into account that already, the CPU is likely to use the least amount of power in todays laptops, compared to the hard drive, CD drive, DVD drive, video controller, or active matrix screen...
I'll disagree with you on a couple points, for starters Transmeta isn't exactly a brand new start-up as I think you are implying. They have been around Silicon Valley for about 5-6 years. Second of all I think you're wrong about no one knowing about the Crusoe, the day it was released I saw half a dozen news reports about it and tons of stuff all over ZDTV. ZDTV does have quite a few viewers all over the country and they all talk to their friends about things they see on the network so I would imagine by now plenty of people realize there is something other than Intel in the chip market. Alot more people now are finding themselves keeping up with technostuff. While this adds a whole bunch of new "Me too!" type users it also lends to increasing mindshare of technostuff.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I want a 1Ghz chip that costs 5$ that runs MacOS X.
I just KNOW that Intel will go out of business soon.
Linux is the best thing ever, heeeeeey you meanie head open up your source code cuz we said so!
Geez this topic is like a giant whine fest. The Crusoe is a good processor that will be able to hold its own against Intel's mobile chips. Big deal. This doesn't mean Intel is going to close its doors next year or that anything you buy now won't ever be obsolete. Everything eventually becomes obsolete in the computer world merely by obeying Moore's law. Intel's monkey clogging all the gears in the 32-bit x86 instruction set. Just look at the Athlon if you need convincing. The Athlon needs a ton of extra die to take care of x86 instruction handling, even Intel's chips have a rough time with x86. In my opinion x86 has FAR outlived its usefulness as an ISA. Sure we have 800Mhz Athlons but compare these to other entirely RISC based processors and you'll find that clock speed isn't everything. The thing that impressed me most with the Crusoe wasn't its handling of x86 code but the fact that Transmeta looked up RISC in a technical dictionary and actually followed the RISC ideology. Intel needs to do something similar and completely reengineer an existing chip, not revamp and speed up an old design. The Merced/Itanium was supposed to do this but everyone is still waiting for a real scoop on that project. The Crusoe achieved lower power consumption cutting down the die size while the Coppermine achieved lower power consumption by shrinking the transistor size. A chip I would be impressed by is one that was a happy medium between the two lines of thought. A 64/128-bit RISC processor that kept code translation down to a minimum (maybe with JIT instance specific compiling or compiling strait to machine code a la Java) AND most importantly had tiny transistors on a pretty small die. I would be very happy with a processor that could get me 3Gops and only dissipate 2-3 watts of power. That kind of chip is not even far fetched right this minute, it will just be whoever figures out how to balance egos and ideology.
I think this can be compared in part to American cars in the 70s. For years American dealers were building behemoths that sucked gas but had pretty damn good power, then along came Honda and the other Japanese cars that were really fuel efficient but sacrificed a bit of power to get that. Eventually the American car makers tried more fuel efficient cars but ended up proving they needed to rethink their engineering philosophy. Now you can expect a decent priced car to have a good amount of power while still getting 20-25mpg in the city.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I fail to see how Northwood would be a direct competitor to a "chameleon" such as Crusoe. When I read the information on Crusoe, I was astounded.
Intel is making this type of announcement, frankly because they see the death of thier mobile processors. And evidently with the unvieling of actual working IA64 machines...why would they even bother with more IA32 stuff?
I'd like to know what Intel is thinking. Are they truly worried, or does it just look like it?
-Pat
-- FreeBSD - The Power to Serve NetBSD - of course it runs NetBSD OpenBSD - Armed to the Gills Three tools in our
The basic design is wrong. There is zero mention on Intels web site about how many watts a Mobile Pentium II consumes for a reason (except in standby and deep sleep modes).
Heat is another reason. Who wants to hold a 110 degree device in your hand all day? Nice sweaty palms.
Not to beat the computers vs automobiles down, but this does in some way feel like back when the Japanese automobile manufacturers started taking on Detroit, with its low powered but cheap and fuel efficient cars those high powered gas guzzling models. And Detroit learned in the end people didn't need to be able to do 200 mph so much as they wanted 30 mpg.
The laptop market is going to go in the same direction. People don't use laptops, excuse me, most people don't use laptops to run Quake and other games at ridiculously high fps. In a laptop, having good enough performance and a long battery life are more than sufficient. They may be slower but the question is will most people really miss the performance. If one does not run graphics-heavy games (and Microsoft operating systems and applications), how much CPU power does one need?
The Transmeta people had some good ideas. Pity that it's the x86 instruction set they're stuck with, though it will be interesting to see how good a Java virtual machine they might get out of it. For some reason I like the idea of a standardized instruction set and then forcing the chips to run that everywhere very appealing.
As for Intel, I think they're going to have to eventually learn that they can't be all things to all people. Microsoft is starting to slowly come to that conclusion as well. Sooner or later you have to pick a market segment and hope that it stabilizes. Trying to go against AMD and Transmeta just seems a bit much for one company to do.
Crusoe is threat to Intel, threat to the Intel StrongARM to be more specific.
I dunno. Do you think that after this announcement people (not slashdotters) will be asking "Yeah, but what about that Transmeta" or saying "Gee, Intel is stepping up the portable market". If they'd timed it a few days earlier, I think it would have been the former. Now, it's the latter. Trust me PR and marketing folk stay up late thinking about this kind of crap, and Intel's are very good.
Why is everybody so convinced that Intel will lose the battle for mobile devices? Intel has been winnng this war for a long time. They haven't done it with FUD like Microsoft, they've done it with great chips.
:-)
Okay, so recently AMD came out with a faster chip. That's great and AMD has been rewarded for it. It's not accurate (as far as I know) to say that Intel has competed unfairly. Also, it's not safe to assume that will not be able to compete on their chip's merits.
Let's just wait and see what they come up with. They have enough money to overcome any first mover advantage that Transmeta may have.
One assumption is safe. The ultimate winner will be us, the consumers.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
That's just foolish. Intel constantly has chips in the pipeline. Does anyone seriously think that the Intel engineers were sitting with their feet up on their desks and then suddenly there was the Transmeta announcement? "Good God! We better start designing a new chip!"
Not to mention that Intel constantly makes new roadmap announcements, so the FUD argument doesn't fly either.
I still might point out that Transmeta has not even shipped a product yet, so I would argue against throwing FUD in glass houses.
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Does anyone here realize how long it takes to design a new architecture? How about 3-4 years? (How long did Transmeta take? Almost 5 years.) My point is that Willamette wasn't rushed out to compete with Athlon, since Willamette designs must have started before anyone had even heard of the K6-2. So now you think that Intel has mentioned a future laptop chip just because of Transmeta??? Did you think that the were going to use the mobile PIII forever? Willamette comes out in Q2 or Q3, so you would expect a mobile version a year later, just like with the P6 architecture. I haven't found except Slashdotters who think that Transmeta is a competitor to Intel's main processor business. It is a competitor to StrongArm and Motorola's embedded chips, period. By the way: anyone see the news about Timna? It is a very low power (no numbers were mentioned)completely integerated chip (sound, video, chipset, all integrated with the CPU) which Intel is supposed to announce next week. *That* might be a competitor to Transmeta, but its design must have started several years ago, too. Remember, everyone can see trends develop. Transmeta isn't some god-like company just because the Finn works there.