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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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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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