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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. "
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.
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http://gammatron.weblogger.com
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.
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.