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Crusoe To Be Used By Netwinder, IBM, NEC, Others
theGEEK writes "Rebel.com will be making Netwinders with the crusoe chip from Transmeta. In related news, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM and NEC will all be showing off notebooks using the Crusoe today."
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I'd like SMP on the consumer end so that starting Netscape doesn't make my MP3 skip.
/dev/hda" in your rc.local script. (or "man hdparm" to find more tweaks, turning on DMA is just the most important).
Unless you have a years-old processor, you shouldn't need a second CPU to keep MP3s from skipping. Your problem is more likely misconfiguration of the system you have.
Are you using DMA (or UDMA if you've got it, but switching from PIO to DMA is the big CPU saver) on your hard disks? If not, then every heavy disk access (like starting up a big program) is begging your CPU to drop whatever else it's doing (like playing MP3s) and handle the flood of interrupts from the drive.
If you're using Linux, try putting "hdparm -d 1
If you're using Windows (even Win98), there are lots of motherboards with UDMA drivers that don't get installed by default; check the manufacturer's website. And even if the drivers are installed they may not be turned on; there's a checkbox somewhere in one of those Control Panel doohickies.
If that is insufficient by itself, try making your MP3 player a niced or realtime process. If you make xmms suid root, for example, there's an option to make it a realtime process. (why it doesn't give you a separate option to set a nice level, I have no idea). This can be a stability/security risk, so don't do it on the company web server.
This is all well and good, but what I want to know is - can I afford one? Has anyone seen mention of prices for a computing device using a Transmeta processor?
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The real questions are whether
1) Crusoe with linux can use x86 linux binaries
That was the real question months ago. Where you been, under a rock?
--
> Methinks you have forgotten that
> Transmeta has a non-existent PR
> department.
They have a mailing list for product announcements. They should use it, that's all I ask for.
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I have to correct myself. I haven't tested it personally, but according to my trusty copy of the IEEE 802.11 Handbook, FHSS devices should be interoperable with 11Mbps DSSS devices. Given that, $78 is a pretty good deal for a PCMCIA wireless card. I would still recommend an Airport for an access point, however.
This will start happening pretty fast. With Apple AirPort's going for $280.00 at PCConnection which can be configured under Linux with a Java management client, the other folks won't have a choice but to drop prices.
Um, exactly how an AirPort, which is 802.11b compatable, can run at 11Mbps, includes a NAT/DHCP server, a modem/PPP client, can be configured from Linux, and priced at $280 is somehow "overpriced crapola" compared to an access point which runs 802.11 at 2Mbps for $360. But whatever.
Their PCMCIA cards are attractvely priced at $78, however. Too bad most of the 802.11 manufactures have moved to DSSS instead of FHSS so that they can run at 11Mbps, so the Webgear stuff won't work with most new equipment.
It's the slowest high end chip. It's the only performance processor that posts lower specfp2000 numbers than the x86.
The 450 mhz us II is less than half the speed of the 667 mhz ev67 alpha.
Sun needs the us III core more than intel needs the p7.
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
Link for you:
Apples power failure.
I believe that the new intel mobile chips with speedstep actually consume fewer watts than the G4.
What's definite is that x86 slaps the g4 all over the place on both bandwidth and integer performance. And the ghz t-bird beats the 500mhz g4 by a very wide margin in floating point.
As far as your assertion that x86 instructions require a lot of transistors, that's only if they're implemented in hardware. The crusoe uses software translation. (not the same as software emulation)
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
Q4 = Tomorrow.
:)
Repeat when necessary
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Look at WebGear for cheap wireless networking stuff. I have some of their stuff and it works great. Even has Linux drivers.
The fact it has nothing to do with Apple's overpriced crapola is an added bonus.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Are the Netwinders hideously overpriced? I looked around and couldn't find anything for under $1000 US. Is it just that form factor? Am I missing something?
I wouldn't be so sure. Some things are always going to be expensive, for various reasons. I know we're jumping industries here, but a car catalyst is never going to be cheap beacuse it's made of platinum or rhodium. Now, I don't know enough about the details of LCDs to know whether this is definitely the case, but with digital watches and mobile phones te small ones have been here in huge volume for some time. Laptops and LCD monitors aren't a small market either, though they're smaller in relative terms.
Anyway. I'd say, looking from the outside, that LCD prices probably haven't got that much further to fall without a major breakthrough.
LEPs are looking very interesting and may well produce some nice results but I can't see LCDs usable in decent webpads becoming that cheap.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Erm...
The nature of a catalystic converter - yes, I was just being lazy - means it actually has to be made out of the materials they use. Cheap alloys aren't a possibility.
I can't see electric cars coming all that soon, though. Battery technology is still a _major_ problem and they've been working hard with no real results for ages. I'd have to say that hydrogen power, in one form or another, looks by far and away the most likely.
If we want to look at it from another side, electric cars wouldn't actually help the environment as a whole - only the local environment. The electricity has to come from somewhere and, right now, power stations are _worse_.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
When you add in the cost of electricity for an always on computer, the Netwinder pays for itself in about two years compared to a Intel-based PC. It uses only about 7 watts average and 15 watts max.
True. I'd really like reduced power requirements. However, computers often get replaced eery couple of years, so financially its a wash.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I have no idea if it's possible with Crusoe, but I would love an SMP box based on Transmeta chips.
Think about it. TM chips are tiny, cheap, and low-power. You could cram a bunch of them into a case and motherboard that are within reach of common people. So a Crusoe 700Mhz = PIII 500 Mhz. I guarantee 8 or 16 Crusoe 700s will beat any two PIII 8xxs (1GHz PIII is not certified for SMP).
Of course, for various reasons, the consumer market is anti-smp. Intel would rather sell you one super-expensive chip than two cheap chips. OEMs would rather you buy a whole new system than simply add another processor. etc.
From now on, everyone needs to enter many fake or flawed submissions. It could be a completely made up story, it could have fake URLs, or it could be a real story with incorrect facts and misleading titles.
The general idea is that after they realize that so many submissions are flawed, the editors will be more inclined to check the sources before posting.
You wouldn't perchance be a fan of Scotsman's tactics to ensure fact-checking among Internet reporters on a different subject, would you?
His two shots at this experiment got him a lot of vitriol from Internet wrestling "reporters"...and also a lot of accolades from people sick of the pseudo-news that infest a lot of the newsboards that have little better to do than post rumours and rip off Dave Meltzer, Wade Keller and Dave Scherer.
Despite all the potential for abuse and harassment, it seems such an operation did force people to check their facts more carefully, lest they lose credibility. It's something of a nasty guerilla tactic that can easily go haywire and result in...errr...unintended consequences.
Then again, I'm sure Taco and the crew deal with at least 100 bullshit submissions a day. Like they need any more:)
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Ok, this is actually a really interesting point.
Why are the G4s giving motorola such a hard time getting them to run fast? Complicated instruction dependencies? Not deep enough a pipeline?
If the Transmeta people are able to claw back some performance by having a simpler core run fast and then dynamically compiling it, that would be cool.
On a related note, since the TM is a VLIW proc, it should (?) have a decent chance of dealing ok with the AltiVec instructions, no?
Johan
What you're thinking of is the Mac ROM, which used to be a megabyte or two of low-level code stored in a ROM chip on the mainboard. These were copyrighted by Apple, and were necessary for MacOS to run. This meant that PowerMac cloners had to license the ROM from Apple, and that MacOS emulators and virtual machines (Mac-on-linux, SheepShaver et al) needed a ROM image in order to run.
Since MacOS 8.6 however, the "ROM" actually resides in a system file loaded into memory straight from disk. New Macs being manufactured don't even have a traditional style "MacOS ROM" chip. Programs like MOL boot MacOS just fine using nothing but the ROM file from the install CD.
Windows NT3.51 came in a version for x86, MIPS, sparc, Alpha and PowerPC. NT4.0 still comes in a version for the Alpha architecture, but is no longer supported. Microsoft ported their most popular apps, and gave complete compiler suites away for the Alpha architecture trying to get companies to support the Alpha-NT platform
That was a ploy. They had DEC write their own x86 software emulator for Alpha NT (for a long time DEC had more programmers working on NT than Microsoft), and Alpha NT still sucked rocks. Microsoft shelled it for the 2000 series, although we have a beta version running here. One of Microsoft's favorite cards to play was threatening Intel with boosting alpha Windows development. You may recall it was this threat that caused Intel to halt its development of multimedia tools for its newer (at the time) MMX chips. Intel was trying to use software to boost its share over AMD/Cyrix, but Microsoft viewed that as a low level threat.
Alpha NT never had the most important software available. Like Office, for example. Its strongest value to Microsoft was the leverage it used against Intel. You could run such things in x86 emulators, but if you think that is viable I think you never tried it.
no one can simply force the PC architecture to switch to a different processor.
Microsoft can and has kept processor development back. How can a new processor be successful when the OS on 95% of the world's computers only talks x86 ?? Microsoft NEVER made a serious attempt to make its product cross platform. They had a monopoly, and they knew they could force the chipmakers to bend to their will.
Umm, so what if a car's catalytic converter (I guess that's what you mean when you say "car catalyst") is currently made of expensive materials like platinum or rhodium? You're assuming no one will innovate to bring prices down. If a company can find a way to make a catalytic converter using cheap alloys, that company could wipe up the competition in sales--so there's pressure to innovate. Companies always invest a lot in R&D, and often invent exotic but cheap alloys that can do the same thing as more expensive materials. TECH DOESN'T SIT STILL, it moves forward. People will eventually invent cheaper ways to do any given task, to create any given object. That includes catalytic converters and LCD screens. Not that we'll need catalytic converters in ten or fifteen years, since the electric car is becoming more of a reality and even more of a necessity, what with OPEC's price-fixing bullshit.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
What on earth are you talking about? How can you possibly say "never" when talking about price drops on computing hardware? Just like everything else in this industry that starts out expensive, manufacturers will find cheaper ways to make LCDs, and soon enough you will see them on the backs of cereal boxes.
All the more reason why they are cool!
Now we just knock down the cost of 802.11 a notch, and those pads start to look pretty darn nice :-)
Eh...
About the only thing I see promising is up-coming disposable cell phones. Techlust seems to come at some cost, and its more than the ultimate feast at Red Lobster.
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I have a solution to the problem that's been plaguing slashdot for the past several months. We can make it so the slashdot editors check the facts on every story before they post it.
It's really quite simple.
From now on, everyone needs to enter many fake or flawed submissions. It could be a completely made up story, it could have fake URLs, or it could be a real story with incorrect facts and misleading titles.
The general idea is that after they realize that so many submissions are flawed, the editors will be more inclined to check the sources before posting.
I registered with Transmeta's product mailing list some time ago, yet I still haven't received a single message from them about upcoming products. What's going on there?
/please/ get your act together!
/usr/local/howto :-) but it has now been superseded by Werner Heuser's excellent Laptop Howto).
:-)
If someone from Transmeta's PR department is reading this: Hello?
That said, I look forward to a Transmeta-powered product, I really do. Not having a car and spending most of my travelling on bicycles, in buses, on trains, I always bought ultra-light computers for my work.
Raw CPU speed never was a *big* issue for me while on the road, but portability and more than that battery time (!) are (I wrote the Battery Powered Linux Mini-Howto sometime in 1997, you can still find it in your
I also want a Transmeta-powered desktop mini-workstation, running silent without a fan, with minimal footprint on the desk and little power consumption.
I want a mini-server that serves as a home network file server, ISDN router, fax, answering machine and MP3 player that I can leave running all day and that doesn't consume a few dozen watts while idle.
These products are literally what I have been waiting for since a few years. I have been watching the Megahertz and 3D graphics cards race of the market with disgust and hoped for a sign of sanity in all this useless power- and feature-sucking.
Transmeta, here's a possible client. Please don't disappoint me.
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It's amazing to think that they have spent so many years getting away with regurgitating the pentium pro core, without any solid competition.
And just what, pray tell, is wrong with the p6 core? It's gone from 150 to 1000 mhz. (if you can get one.) It stomped every competitor in integer performance when it came out. It still powers past everything but the athlon and alpha in integer speed. It's proven to be flexible and scalable. Is it a problem that they've been improving a good core rather than making a new one?
If you want to bash a company for regurgitating an obsolete core, pick Sun.
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
ZDNet's take on it
Says that NEC's Crusoe laptop can run for 8 hours running MS office apps..
Worse than that, the Duron is now beginning to eat up the marketshare of their once-unique Celeron.
:-). Now, they compete with the Athlon in the desktop, the Duron in the low-end desktop, and Crusoe in the laptop. And their only remaining area of exclusitivity is only temporary wile AMD gets its act together with the dual Athlon. And this area was already one of their weaker spots, with competition from Solaris and Alpha in the very high-end we-don't-care-how-much-it-costs department.
Intel basically was untouched in four areas: High-end server, desktop, low-end desktop, and laptop. No, for our purposes, Cyrix and the K6-2 do not count as competition
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
For that matter, how to they compete in price against the AIM-cabal's G3, which runs for hours off the static electricity of your body and actually cools the air around its own heatsinks, but costs more than a new family car... or the good old "de"Celeron, which doubles your power bill and is so hot that you can cook an egg on the next desk over, but can be bought in the Wal-mart bargain bin for $3 a pop and overclocked to 2500 MHz?
(Disclaimer: The above might contain a few slight exaggerations of the strengths and weaknesses of various CPU's.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
> Do you feel that the Linux community has
> fallen victim to Transmeta's brilliant
> public relations? Since Linus Torvalds
> has joined Transmeta, everyone has
> become aware of Transmeta's entire
> product line...
Yes and no.
I was just as excited about the PowerPC chips when they were new on the market and hoped for affordable PowerPC hardware that could replace the vanilla Wintel box on my desktop. And the PowerPC chip wasn't tied to "one famous person", at least not for me.
I remember discussions years ago with my co-students during computer science classes about how great this chip would be and how it would be a *true* alternative to the Intel product line.
However, Apple killed off the clones and PRPC (or whatever the non-Apple Power PC hardware setup was called) was stomped before it really took off.
So here I sit now, waiting for the next contestant. The iMac is interesting, but then again, Transmeta looks like the better idea to me now. See my other post in this thread about that...
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Which is good of course. Maybe Intel might stop being so sluggish all these years. It's amazing to think that they have spent so many years getting away with regurgitating the pentium pro core, without any solid competition.
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
This is a kind twisty story. Buuuut.
Back in the day, Windows and Mac were real competitors. When Mac introduced a new line, with a new processor, they would allow new instruction sets. The old instruction sets would be emulated in software. They figured the new processor was faster, and that eventually everything would get recoded anyway. Worked pretty well for them.
Well, not so in Redmond. Microsoft would not recode X86 instruction sets for other processors. If a chip manufacturer wanted to capture the Windows market, they had to do X86. So, we see efforts like those at AMD in the Athlon to do hardware translation, and at Transmeta to do software emulation.
Meanwhile, Mac already has a G4 that is comparable to the Crusoe for power consumption, and per CPU cycle as fast as X86 processors get. The bottom line is that it is really dumb to stick to old inefficient instruction sets just because your monopolistic OS company refuses to do a little work to earn its tens of billions.
I hope Crusoe is REALLY successful. AMD and Intel will NEVER create a chip as low on power as a G4 and as fast. Or even a Crusoe. X86 instruction sets simply require a LOT of transistors to work.
The real questions are whether
1) Crusoe with linux can use x86 linux binaries
2) Crusoe linux laptops are faster than G4 linux laptops (once those actually run)
Hopefully, the Crusoe Netwinder will be as fully-functional as the current Netwinder family, and not "just" the "gateway" product mentioned in the article. After all, it could be used as more than just a gateway/firewall/router type of box; I'd love to use one as a small file server networked to my current AMD box. All I need is for it to have a PCI slot capable of using a Promise IDE RAID card; it would free up a PCI slot and a couple drive bays from my current computer, and I'd be very happy with it--serving files to a local box isn't so processor-intensive that the Crusoe would be overwhelmed.
I've been hoping that the Crusoe would make it into some desktop products like the Netwinder, since notebook products are inevitably too bloody expensive (and fairly useless to me, anyway--drive bays! I need more drive bays! not a hobbled travelling PC). After all, not everyone wants/needs the screaming-fast performance of an 800MHz Athlon; some of us want a Crusoe desktop machine for both the "wow factor" and to support the company, but given the nature of the new processor and its chipset DIY commodity mobos and retail processors aren't realistic for any time soon.
Personally, my old 400MHz K6-2 is still fast enough for everything I do on a daily basis--the occasional video clip rendering notwithstanding (just leave the box alone for a few hours, and...), and I bought the thing over a year ago to support AMD even though the Inetl Celeron 366 was faster for the same price. I can't in good conscience buy five-year-old tech from Intel, I have to support competition in the market--and now with Thunderbird and Duron it looks like AMD is finally tromping Intel on all fronts, hooray for supporting the underdog. Look at all the good we who have supported AMD through the dark ages have now brought about: AMD chips that whomp Intel, but just as significant, lower Intel prices and higher Intel clockspeeds. How can self-respecting geeks buy Intel, knowing that Intel's own roadmap had us all still using processors in the 400-600MHz range right now, with AMD's Athlon being the only thing which picked up the pace? And now, because of AMD, Willamette is going to be released not just for servers, but as a replacement for the ancient-cored P!!! with the P!!! Coppermine becoming their new low-end processor to compete against Duron. Intel had been planning to shove that integrated bullshit Timna (think Cyrix MediaGX) down our throats as a Celeron replacement, with the P!!! for higher-end consumers, and the Willamette for high-end workstations and servers only. That's what their roadmaps said before AMD put the Athlon squeeze on. Folks, unless you need a dual- or quad-processor box *right now*, don't support Intel--they don't deserve it. AMD is now the real innovator, even though they're still the little guy. And Transmeta, support Transmeta as well--they're innovating in different and commendable ways. But there's no excuse for supporting Intel, the company which was going to move us at a snail's pace until AMD stepped it up.
Anyway, I was planning to turn my old 400MHz box into a fileserver at the end of the year/early next year when I can get my hands on a dual Athlon motherboard, but I'd gladly buy a Crusoe desktop to do that fileserving. Thank you, Rebel.com, if you follow through and make it good.
So, am I the only one who wants a Crusoe desktop, or are there other technogeeks out there who'll buy a Crusoe desktop system aither in its Netwinder incarnation or otherwise?
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Do you feel that the Linux community has fallen victim to Transmeta's brilliant public relations? Since Linus Torvalds has joined Transmeta, everyone has become aware of Transmeta's entire product line... and not only that, most of you are crazy about it! Don't get me wrong; Transmeta really does have a great product with Crusoe. However, I am curious as to how differently Crusoe would have been accepted had Torvalds not helped in its development.
my blog
Kinda sad how the upshot of all the nifty news technology is the rather boring (though admittedly valuable) goal of low power consumption. The original press conference read sort of like the Cheese Shop Sketch.
"The crusoe can emulate any chip at all."
"Like a PowerPC?"
"Theoretically."
"Or an Alpha?"
"Technically."
"Or a Dragonball?"
"Probably."
"So what can it actually emulate?"
"Any chip at all, so long as it's an x86."
(1) The fact that Crusoe doesn't require a whole lot of power doesn't mean that it will automatically be thrown into notebooks with standard Li-Ion batteries and get 1000 hours of battery life. The idea is that if you're more efficient, you need less physical battery. That means smaller system. That means ultralight, which is everything with notebooks these days. I know plenty of folks who would give up a very fast and loaded desktop-equivalent notebook for a VAIO that is light, decent, and looks good.
(2) Less Heat eliminates need for a processor cooling fan. eliminating the need for a fan makes the package smaller. see also #1.
(3) Companies, especially Big Blue, are tired of forking over notebook profits to Intel. period. Crusoe is very affordable, and that will bring prices for notebooks down all over the place. Intel will still dominate, but at least you won't have to pay a premium price just because you want a PIII-600 in your notebook.
(4) Being able to alter the emulation processes at the software level means that this is a chip that will grow and improve with time. Intel's coming out with more SSE multimedia extensions? Patch crusoe. Boom. Upgraded Crusoe. No hardware swap required.
(5) Yes, being able to theoretically emulate anything is pretty lame. Alpha and Dragonball, while potential, are not likely to get emulated with this. What will? PowerPC. I guarantee that Transmeta has a team trying to get down the instruction set for the G4. I know many a web designer who would run out and buy a system if they could run both Windoze and MacOS on the same hardware without something like Virtual PC. It's not as appealing to the market, but it may eventually be part of Transmeta's value proposition. I'd expect to see it within the next 12 months, and expect to see companies like Dell and NEC making notebooks that have full G4 support and Apple jumping on the bandwagon.
Bottom Line: Crusoe is revolutionary. It will take a while for the waves to be made, but we'll all be using faster, cheaper, lighter, cooler, better computers as a result. Intel needed some additional competition.
Here is the official press release. http://www.rebel.com/corporate/press/20000627.html
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