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IBM To Demo Crusoe Thinkpad
CoreDump writes: "Just ran across this story at News.com about IBM announcing that they will demo a Crusoe based Thinkpad at PC Expo. This is what I've been waiting for, not an "appliance", but an actual full-blown system that can be used every day. They aren't planning products until the fourth quarter, but I know what *I* want to find under the tree on Dec. 25th.
"
If the price is right you can bank on it. I seen several times claims that Intel expects to make a bigger margin on its mobile pentium chips to make up for the thin margins on the more competition-driven desktop chip market. If Transmeta can get the devices made in large volumes and they really do have the advantage of low power consumption then they will pick up the minor players quickly. People like Dell are just too in-bed with Intel though.
--
I just finished an assignment on the Crusoe chip for 2nd year Uni at Sydney Uni, and as far as I know, the x86 emulation is essentially software but is pretty tweaked for the x86 instruction set. This isn't to say it's impossible for it to be made able to emulate the PPC, but I think the team would have to completely rewrite their "code morphing" software that handles the x86 emulation; it has a lot of exception handling that is very specific to the architecture - they even had to study how blue screens of death were caused under windows so that these were produced when "necessary" *grin*
:-)
I guess what I'm saying is that a lot of work would have to go in to it because of the difference in architecture between the PPC and x86 - it'd be like redoing it for MIPS or something
Does anyone have information on whether someone is working on having Cruesoe run Java bytecode? It was said that due to Cruesoe's adaptability features it /could/ do so, but that's just theory.
I don't see how those relate. I mean, the biggest /. using wireless LAN is my lack of a
barrier to my sitting at my breakfast table
reading
breakfast table.
A plain-old ix86 laptop with a Lucent Wavelan
card does the job just fine. I can see Crusoe
as a lower-power chip, or a higher performance
chip (?), or a chip that can pretend to be various
other CPU types. It could even be the base of a
cheaper device, but most of those costs (e.g.
display) are outside the CPU.
But, as for wireless computing, it's already here.
We (and our future generations) will laugh at the statement, "...paving the way for a computer that could run all day on a single battery." just as much as we laugh at, "640k ought to be enough for anybody." now... ;-)
I can't wait.
-Adam
There's so much bad in the best of us
and so much good in the worst of us
that it doesn't behoove any of us
to talk about the rest of us.
Yes, indeed. Ages ago in computer years, Intel came out with that marvelous piece of silicon known as the 486-SX. Elves throughout the Intel plant worked strenuously with a scratch awl, digging out that floating point silicon.
These days, Intel doesn't have the time, nor the resources, to engage in such operations themselves. They've got Xeons to pump out. So they've partnered with Transmeta, who are proud to introduce . . .
Crusoe- also known as . . .
. . . the Pentium-SX ! ! !
For those light duty machines ladies often carry in their handbags. Truly the derringer of microprocessors.
The point of Moore's Law was that the growth rate was exponential, not the particular value for the doubling time.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
..is a corp speak term for any system that does what wintel machines do without stepping on any toes by saying "Heir to the functionality of the destop PC" or "Will completely replace Microsofts and Intel's strangle hold on the home PC market." Transmetta is kicking Wintel where it hurts. Laptops have been Intel's "Australia" (as in the game risk) Intel has heavy competition in the desktop market from AMD. Sun, Compaq etc. are slapping Intel on the other front server side. Transmetta is going to severely dent Intel's laptop profits. At the same time Transmetta is taking a chunk of Intel's profits you can bet they hired Linus to take a chunk out of M$ too. Goodbye Win CE and Win 9x on laptops. Say hello to x86 instruction set translators and Linux.
I am not as much pro-linux anti-wintel as I am pro competition. Have you priced laptops recently? I am not an ardent AMD fan but look at what a little competition has done to the desktop CPU market.
Intel PIII-933mhz $874.00 down $386.00 overnight because of AMD's 1Ghz T-bird release.
drop the price of every laptop by $386.00 because of transmetta and laptop prices start looking a little more sane.
I just don't understand why a small hot startup would want to avoid doing business with the gentle giant M$ (Sarcasm).
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
A recent news.com story mentioned that their new models are the cheapest yet - in the $ 1,200 range.
... maybe next year :-).
Of course the really cool ones are always more expensive, but they've gone down quite a bit. A few years back, the state of the art 750 series was pushing $ 7,000. Now the closest equivalent (with the great 15" screen) is pushing $4,000, not bad relatively speaking.
You can get reconditioned ThinkPads at ubid.com - I bought my 770Z (366mhz, 128mb ram [upgraded to 256], 14gb hard drive, 1280x1024 active matrix screen]) for $ 2,750. I've had it a few months and I'm very pleased with it - the display has perfectly crisp tiny characters that are just perfect for the programmer who likes having lots of information in little space.
But I still want the new titatium case and the spiffier higher resolution screens
D
----
Generally, I'm a pretty trusting person, but I wouldn't believe a word the man says. If his testimony in the trial isn't Clintonian enough, go take a look at his books. Rather, grab a first edition of his first book, and then a second edition. Note all the huge changes- MSN is the future in the first edition, and the 'net is the future the second time around. I mean, it's bad enough to lie and say you didn't say something, but to erase history like that without even acknowledging your initial mistake is pretty scary. ~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Simultaneously run different virtual machines each with native code.
This would probably not be practical without some special hardware features, but it would be cool.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I guess I'm being skeptical here, but I won't buy into this whole Crusoe/Transmeta idea until I can sit at my breakfast table reading /. using wireless LAN.
I frequently do this with a laptop and a WebGear Aviator 2.4 Ghz spread spectrum network card. This has something like 1.2Mbit/sec bandwith, which is plenty for Internet, and excellent range -- hundreds of feet. It is also supported in the recent Linux kernels, so it is very easy to get running.
The main limitation on the client side is the form factor, a rather largish PC card; this won't fit in most PDAs. The last PDA I've seen with a full fledged PC card slot was the Newton. Too bad it was discontinued, the Newton with this card would rock.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
After Crusoe Transmeta's next chip will have only one transistor and implement the rest through software.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
There is an excellent document entitled The Technology Behind Crusoe(tm) Processors describing the Crusoe's unique software/hardware hybrid available at http://www.crusoe.com/cr usoe/download/pdf/crusoetechwp.pdf. It details how a simple, custom VLIW-like core is combined with a software "code morphing" layer to produce an out-of-order execution unit which is far more sophisticated than than current hardware designs (like the P6 architecture).
The key to lower heat output is lower power consumption. The Crusoe accomplishes this in the following ways:
u soetechwp.pdf
1. By performing scheduling and the like in software, the Crusoe has far fewer transistors (read ~1/4) than a PIII or Athlon. Hence, lower power consumption.
2. In addition, Crusoe has a power management "system" that actually lowers the clock speed whenever less speed is needed. All chips should do that, but they don't. And it doesn't slow down memory access at all, since the bottleneck there is not the processor clock speed. This technology is referred to as LongRun. Here's a quote from Transmeta:
"In a mobile setting, most conventional x86 CPUs regulate their power consumption by rapidly alternating between running the processor at full speed and (in effect) turning the processor off. Different performance levels can be obtained by varying the on/off ratio (the "duty cycle"). However, with this approach, the processor may be shut off just when a time-critical application needs it. This can result in glitches, such as dropped frames during movie playback, that are perceptible (and annoying) to a user.
In contrast, the TM5400 can adjust its power consumption without turning itself off - instead, it can adjust its clock frequency on the fly. It does so extremely quickly, and without requiring an operating system reboot or other slow and involved OS or BIOS operation. As a result, software can continuously monitor the demands on
the processor and dynamically pick just the right clock speed (and hence power consumption) needed to run the application - no more and no less - so no power is wasted. Since the switching happens so quickly, it is not noticeable to the user.
Finally, the Code Morphing software can also adjust the Crusoe processor's voltage on the fly (since at a lower operating frequency, a lower voltage can be used). Because power varies linearly with clock speed and by the square of the voltage, adjusting both can produce cubic reductions in power consumption, whereas conventional CPUs can adjust power only linearly. For example, assume an application program only requires 90 percent of the processor's speed. On a conventional processor, throttling back the processor speed by 10 percent cuts power by 10 percent, whereas under the same conditions, LongRun power management can reduce power by almost 30 percent (0.903 = 0.73) - a noticeable advantage!"
For more information I highly recommend everybody to read "The Technology Behind Crusoe(TM) Processors".
Available at:
http://www.transmeta.com/crusoe/download/pdf/cr
Transmeta's answered that question several times.
The thing is, the current breed of chips from transmeta are designed, that is, the hardware is designed, to be able to emulate x86.
Not to say they couldn't come up with a new one that can pretend to be PPC as well, but it sounds like an awful lot of work for such a small market.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Speed and memory both seem to follow Moore's law*, but batteries haven't doubled in capacity in a decade, and longer before that, and power consumption has similarly been slow to come down.
These are both things that will be used if they're available. Like processor speed and memory, the raw figures double, but your computing experience isn't 64 times as fast as it was in 1991, even if your modem is.
It'll either be a long time before your laptop will run easily on a battery for a day, or it'll be a breakthrough product/configuration, not a steady improvement.
*Moore's law actually originally said the number of transistors on a chip would double every year. This was stretched to 18 months a decade later to fit the data, then applied to processor speed, price (inverse), and memory, whenever it seemed nifty to do so.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
this is incorrect. They made macs which had PCs on PCI cards. Hitting command-return would switch between the PC's video display (hooked via a special connector to the mac's monitor) and the mac's video display. The keyboard and mouse input would automatically switch over, and you could cut and paste between them. The 486/66 was just as fast as a PC with a 486/66, and the mac side was a PowerPC 601 at 66MHz as well. They made other PC Compatible versions, up through the 4400/200 I think which had a P133 on it's PC PCI card.
It just seems that by the time this comes out, Intel will already have much faster
And don't forget, lower-power-consumption chips. Check it out:
"[Paul Otellini, co-executive vice president at the Intel Architecture Group, in Santa Clara, Calif.] reviewed Intel's ongoing investments in mobile processors, including a demonstration of a 500MHz Mobile Pentium III that operates at less than 1 watt of power, which Intel expects to ramp to 1GHz in the near future. Intel hopes the chip will be ready this summer...."
Intel eyes Internet as next frontier to cross. (Company Business and Marketing) Dan Briody
InfoWorld May 1, 2000 v22 i18 p5
Web version:
Friday, Apr. 28, 2000
Amiga, (way ahead of its time yet again *grin*) has had something like this for the past 3 years.
;)
:)
The Siamise (SP?) system allows for an Amiga to share resources with a PC system in the same box and uses SCSI to connect the two motherboards. I seem to recall that both win9x and Linux were supported. PC apps could be displayed on the Amiga workbench and likewise amiga apps on the PC partner. This does not really allow the systems to share all resources though. For that consider the Acorn RiscPC.
Acorn produced a system in the early-mid 90s (spring 93 i think but it may well have been 94) which provided a dual headded processor bus capable of supporting not only the native ARM chips but a second processor of practicaly any architecture which would have full use of the same resources of the host. Alas only x86 processor cards were ever produced (At the launch there were many wild suggestions of CRAYs on the second processor bus and for a while PPC looked like it would turn up...) but these allowed windows to run, well crawl
Other issues with the RiscPC architecture limited the system, 16MHz memmory bus, 2MB video ram, no PCI (although ISA cards could be bridged to from the native podule bus). So Acron is no more but I still use my RiscPC (now with StrongARM) if ever i need to do serious work, the UI simply runs rings arrond anything else out there (belive me i've used my fair share.) and there is no better wordprocessor than TechWriter (think WYSIWYG TeX with full AntiAliased fonts)
What on earth is wrong with IBM ?
Sure they have some press releases coming out but generally it's just "Ohh we have this cool thing working now. Go buy it". Why can't they be like other companies that announce products 2 or 3 years before the planed ship date?
IBM lately has been delivering on it's promises on time and quickly. So far the only thing wrong in IBM's "Linux Roadmap" is that the Thinkpads haven't had the broad level of Linux support I would like. Sure some models run flawlessly but most of them need a PCMCIA modem and some simply have broken sound or even video in extreme cases.
Apart from that they are doing pretty damned well. Now what are the odds that this box at ship time ( Christmas? ) will have the kind of seamless 100% compatible Linux support people have been screaming for? Sure some of them will ship with Windows but Knowing IBM they might say "If you use our approved Linux distributions your warranty is still valid".
PS : The headline is the title of a song.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I'm curious as to what that link will do. When I'm ready for bed and done with everything else, I'll click on it and see what happens ;) hehe.
MSK
That would be sweet.
GWEN
Cognosco: To examine, enquire, learn
http://cognosco©datablocks©net
With the same power consumption, and at comparable cost (maybe?), as a P3 laptop, they could make a multiprocessor Crusoe system that blows away anything else out there.
Or we could all go do things that aren't insane, but what fun would that be?
The real question is, is the added performance and durability going to be at a much higher price? Since "Crusoe", "Transmeta", and "Linux" are the hot new buzzwords, I'd be worried about over inflated price tags (even though Transmeta gave a rather low projected cost for the chip itself).
I don't know about Linus, but here's Alan Cox on a Chip.
Nope, Moore's law started out as doubling every one year, as quoted 25 years ago in The Mythical Man-Month, and more recently in the Internet.com Webopedia.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Surely the display on a laptop/webpad/whatever is actually the major power draw, or at least a highly significant one. Does anyone have any component level power consumption figures on a device with cpu, hdd, display and all the other neccessarys (can't see them taking a large share)?
And what about the power efficiency of these devices, are they all running 90% efficient or 10% (and I'll let anyone else who wants to try and define efficient in these circumstances)?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Financing provided by America Online, Gateway, Compaq Computer, Sony and several others should prove to be a real shot in the arm for Transmeta. As recently as the beginning of the year, Wall street was conserned that although Transmeta seemed to have a good product line, their customer base was small and targeted in only niche markets. With a little luck the 88M will change all that and Transmeta can become a much larger player. So far, only relatively small companies such as S3 have announced that they will use Transmeta's processors in their Internet appliances. Today's investments indicate that the technology elite see a future for the company's chips. They seem to have taken a different approach to cloning Intel chips than have other companies, such as AMD or National Semiconductor. Transmeta relies on "code-morphing" to translate instructions an Intel chip can understand into instructions the Transmeta chip can understand. The method appears to be faster than traditional emulation if you can beleive the press releases, because the instructions, once translated, are stored for later use. Last January of February Intel released its SpeedStep chipset, Which supposedly run faster when plugged in but become more efficient with power when unplugged. I wonder if Transmeta incorporated this style technology with theirs. I wish them well, This has got to only be good for the average consumer, having another big player in the processor market brings prices down across the board.
...which provided a dual headded processor bus capable of supporting not only the native ARM chips but a second processor of practicaly any architecture...
Acorn have been doing this sort of thing for a much longer time than 93/94. Anyone who remembers the Acorn BBC B/Master, may well remember a strange connector under the main unit marked "Tube". This was actually a bus connector for a co-pro. If i remember correctly, Z80 & 6502 units were both available, and this is back in the mid 80's.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Someone with a better memory than I will surely fill in the details (please?), but Apple used to make a box which dual-booted Windows and MacOS. The thing had dual CPUs (Motorola and Intel) and needed to be rebooted to use one or the other. It was piggishly slow in both modes.
The problem with the KVM-in-a-box idea is that both operating systems would expect to have the run of all bus-attached devices (sound cards, video cards, SCSI, whatever). To my knowledge, no one has ever come up with a good way to handle this kind of problem: modern computer designs can handle disks appearing and disappearing, and even SCSI attached devices, but not actual SCSI interfaces and whatnot.
Actually, your last idea - a KVM adapter which does split-screen displays - is a great idea. I don't know if its been done already, but it should be, if only for the coolness factor.
That's the first time I've heard of him being called a "philanthropist". Most of the time everyone is acusing him of destroying countries' monetary systems.
Jason PollockA nice small Transmeta VAIO Picturebook would be nice :)
.... well i can dream cant I? :)
Or at least a 505 type series notebook... Preinstalled with Linux (with Sony support)...
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
Use a system like VMware, but with just a simple shared windowing system for the 'boot' OS, you could run windows, linux, MacOS, BeOS, and what have you at the same time, without one being a 'dominant' OS.
Of course, the real beauty comes when you can download the instruction set for Playstation, PS2, Dreamcast, TiVo, or any other embedded system you care to and service all your computing needs with one box.
Well, two if you count the handheld version with PalmOS, NewtonOS, LinuxCE, WAPOS, NokiaOS, etc.
Suddenly the application is the OS...
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I would like to comment here that Transmeta has never (that I recall) said they would have the fastest chip on the block. If they have, they've certainly not been asserting it much. What they have said is that they will have comparable performance and flawless emulation at a dramatically lower current draw.
Transmeta's goal isn't to bring you the most powerful chip around. Intel and AMD are both fighting to have that honor right now, and there's not much room for the little guy there. However, they do intend to have the best current-to-power ratio (I couldn't resist) and we've all seen how well they're doing. It's not like you can take the MediaGX chip seriously or anything.
In summary, for anyone who's read this far down and still not gotten it, Crusoe isn't about SpecFP95. It's about wattage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"