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Does Transmeta Live Up To The Hype?
onion2k writes: "In this article on VNUnet, Toshiba are saying that the Transmeta chip doesn't quite live up to its hype. Bit of a strange thing to do considering Toshiba were one of the original investors, but hey, thats corps for you ..." Talks mostly about the power consumption of the chips. If you're following Transmeta, this is worth a read.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
They get 600k shares, plain and simple. They aren't paying the IPO price, but receiving the shares in return for the technology deal. None of the prices until the day they sell them matter--not even a little bit.
hawk, wearing his econ professor hat
What you need is a pair of the new Alcohol-cooled slacks.
hehe... I wear fire resistant refrigerated cooling vests when at work and riding my bike in 100+ degree heat, but I never thought of wearing such protective wear while hacking on the laptop.
The only protective wear I would like while using the computer might be a helmet and gloves while playing video games. It might be a few years before tactile feedback technology progresses to that point.
Try to find an old tandy model 102. Those will
run 20 hours on 4 aa batteries, and have a text
editor, an address book, built in 300 baud modem,
telecom program, and you can get a snazzy 8085
assembler for it, all in a form factor that puts
most laptops to shame.
"Sour grapes" is to take the stance that, upon learning something is unattainable, it must not be desireable. I.e., if I said "Lear Jets are lame. They are ugly and smell funny," it would be sour grapes. If I said "VWs are lame. They are ugly and smell funny," it wouldn't be. Because I can afford the VW. Note that the truth value of either claim is irrelevant to their status as being or not a 'sour grapes' remark.
However, you do forget that the Palm device is mostly going to display just on a small LCD panel, and its functionality is pretty much a replacement for a DayTimer book for the vast majority of users. In that case, you don't need ridiculous amounts of CPU horsepower to get things going.
The problem for Transmeta is that they may have to better-define their niche between the CPU's used on Palm-like devices and full-blown x86 CPU's. With x86-compatible CPU's dropping in rapidly in power consumption, especially when both AMD and Intel plan to use the 0.13-micron process CPU's within the next 18 months, it's possible that people who manufacture "webpad" units will end up with a 500-600 MHz super-low-power AMD Duron or Intel Celeron mobile CPU running Linux, BeOS, etc.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
the article appears to be slashdotted already, but I would guess, since Toshiba is one of the main investors, this is an attempt to get the name Transmeta out there to be seen and heard a bit more before the IPO. No such thing as bad publicity and all that...
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I post links to stuff here
Well, Toshiba's probably in one of the best positions needed to make a (I don't know if it's appriopriate to say:) unbiased statement. Or at least they have no anti-transmeta feelings for slashdot to jump all over. They own a chunk of Transmeta, which means that if it were possible, they'ed want to be making good statments about them. They're also in all likelihood receiving chips from Transmeta as we speak, testing them and evaluating them, so they're not just speaking on guesswork, as the rest of us are :)
People should step back and say "If Linus had never worked there, would I still be at all interested in this company? Or for that matter, would I have ever heard of it?" In most cases, no and no.
The fact that the CPU is not the main power draw is possible.
But it's for sure the most concentrated source of heat (thus the requirement for air intakes and fans), maybe en par with the hard drive.
It is possible that Transmeta's claims be overestimating the true benefit, but it's a step forward and an heat source on my lap I'll gladly do without, especially considering that CPUs, especially on laptops, are idle most of the time.
Transmeta still have a Code Morphing Trump Card up their sleeves that they could play?
Don't they?
Does Transmeta Live Up To The Hype?
No. Can Transmeta live up to the hype? Yes. Will Transmeta live up to the hype? That remains to be seen.
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And would you have suggested Transmeta if Linus was not working there?
Not to say you wouldn't. I don't know how many other low power CPUs are out there. I know Intel is trying to make some.
Transmeta played it smart. They hired a very well known programmer, who developed a successful OS that has a lot of followers (Although Linus did not write all of it, he does get credit for starting it). Then to have him in every interview, when asked what he does, to reply only with "cool stuff". And to top that off, have a web site that only tells you that "it's not here yet", knowing they will have lots of visitors trying to figure out what Linus does. Than taking all that suspense and introducing your tech with an ending like "Survivor". This has brought Transmeta to the front of the stage. Linus may not be the reason for Transmeta's cool stuff, but he helped make them noticed.
Yes there are those that don't give a rat's ass about Mr. Torvalds, but as long as he is in the news, so is Transmeta. We all know that having your company name known by many helps in the business world.
Conclusion, Linus helped Transmeta get to be in the spot light. But it is up to Transmeta to stay there by their own merits.
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
I think you're right - it's all about the real world pricing. The killer app is the sub-$500 info appliance - like a webpad (fridge-dockable), an MP3 Net Radio, an email clip-on, something small and relatively inexpensive. And the killer for small form is power consumption.
So, even if it only gets by on 1/3 of the power at the same price, it wins the war for the small form, since that means my web pad, which I will pick up and put down and leave for 10 minutes while cooking dinner, now runs all evening on a charge instead of the Wintel version which runs 1.5 hours, so I have to keep remembering to dock it when I'm not using it.
That's the killer app - the Show Me The Money question - can Joe SixPak and Mary Moolah use it as a toy or do they have to RTFM and think about it.
Will in Seattle
Stranger things have happened. Maybe Bill G made a phone call and wanted to snot Linus since he's losing the server war (latest IDC specs show MSFT is number 2 and sinking fast).
...
Remember too that MSFT is coming out with their X-box, so maybe they want to kill the competition with FUD and the night of the long knives
[yes, I own MSFT and RHAT stock, so I win either way, but I don't own Toshiba]
Will in Seattle
This is exactly what I was thinking. Transmeta claims their processor uses much less power, and so it extends battery life. Toshiba isn't disputing that, so Transmeta isn't the problem.
The prob appears to be Toshiba's choice in LCDs.
If the backlight is using 1/4 of the power in notebooks now, surely no one expected Crusoe to alter that (well, it'd be a higher ratio, but the same amount of power), so why's it being mentioned?
I have to agree that 5.6 lbs isn't Ultra Light. How much weight can be saved by not having to design in the cooling systems required by Intel chips?
Intolerant people should be shot.
This is what gets me about the transmeta issues... Lowering power consumption on the CPU is all well and good, but it's useless without reduced consumption on the screens, on the hard drives, CD/DVD drives, etc.
The CPU isn't usually even the main power draw...
I've got an Angel 6700, and at first I did get the 3 hours of normal operation out of it I was promised. (it was neat playing on the internet during power failures for a couple hours :-) )
Of course now that the battery is two years old and basically worn out, I get around ten minutes.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The two chips are not even in the same market.
Please read the article.
Toshiba's comments were strictly with regards to the usefulness of the technology in x86 Laptops - where they said the power consumption was not such a big deal since a large percentage of the power was spent on the backlight and hard drive.
Microsoft's chip is not x-86 compatible. It is targetted at the "internet appliance" segment. Toshibas comments do not apply to that market segment at all.
Mmmm.. Donuts
It's clear that Transmeta began as an academic exercise in exploring a new kind of computer chip that converted the instructions on the fly.
No. That is not really it. Hardware designers knew that there were lots of things with significant advantages over x86 instruction sets. The downside is that the dominant piece of software runs on x86, and that is not going to change anytime soon. Also, x86 is really inefficient in power consumption.
Therefore, the appropriate compensation is software recoding of x86 into a more modern and efficient instruction set. As a bonus the power consumption is really low for the resulting speed.
Did it work ? Only another year will tell. It has certainly made Intel/AMD sit up and take notice that for laptops at least - they were dropping the ball. The 2 hour laptop to run Windoze is inadequate. When I am on the road giving talks and such I want all day performance. Transmeta will provide the CPU end that suits that goal. Of course, a laptop is more than just a CPU, but 1-2 years ago Intel/AMD cpus got hot enough to fry eggs on.
People are happy to argue that Mac laptops already suit this goal - but they cannot run Windoze and thus are marginalized before they begin.
Microsoft has no interest or motivation to port Windoze to other architectures - they suck badly enough trying to keep it running on one. (Don't argue to me about Alpha Windoze - I've used it - and I predict McKinley Windoze will suck badly enough to keep people on 32bit x86 machines indefinitely.)
The rest of us are quite happy to use quality hardware that doesn't double as a hot plate.
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I'll believe it when I see it. =)
Transmeta's been making a lot of noise lately. It's time for them to put up or shut up.
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Nevermind, IMHO Transmeta needs to make these chips available yesterday. Right now, it's vapourware. Sure, they've demonstrated a few prototypes, but if they keep lolly-gagging along like this Intel and AMD are going to blow right by them.
x86 compatibility is only necessary when everybody else is using x86 processors. However, with Intel clearly stating that their next-gen processors are doing away with that giant albatross, Crusoe just doesn't look all that appealing as a mass-market alternative anymore.
Moreover, with more and more producers promising VLIW processing, Crusoe becomes just another fringe player.
I like Transmeta and I like Crusoe. But they need to have it out there, now. Otherwise, they're going to join Nextstep, Amiga and OS/2 in the Whatever Happened To? Hall of Fame.
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So whats the big deal? That double battery life requires more than just swapping a chip? I just don't like seeing Transmeta taking flak for something that I don't recall them ever saying in so many words.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
And where does the heat come from? The battery power.
By lowering the CPU cycle speed, the voltage required is less, and you have less heat.
Also, I would expect any power management portable to automatically park the hard drive, and turn off the LCD after so many minutes of inactivity (user would determine the time as to their work habits.)
A better analogy would be that your 150 mpg engine is getting dissed by manufacturers because it only gets 75 mpg when they slap it into a Humvee.
Crusoe may or may not live up to the hype, but when Toshiba says the backlight on their laptops takes 25% of the laptops' power and then goes on to complain that Crusoe only improves battery life by 40%-50%... Well, that would indeed seem to indicate an engineering problem; I just don't think it's Transmeta's.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
I work for a big corporation and I can say that it is unusual for any company to say its product doesn't live up to the hype. What we (not me, but others in my organization) normally do is come up with strange configurations of our hardware that make these amazing claims possible. Its suprising to hear anyone say that something they have a stake in is not living up to the hype. I'm not sure if this is good or bad. What could the ulterior motives be? If the motive is that they plan to use these in Toshiba notebooks and that won't work, good for us. I want a wearable computer anyway (which won't need a stupid backlight). My guess, however, would be that it's going to suck a lot worse than anyone is letting on. Call it pessimist's intuition :)
We're all a bunch of glorified monkeys.
Most of the TM bashing I've ever heard is that they use completely contrived benchmarks that put little-to-no load on their chip to fabricate these completely ridiculous power numbers so they look great against Intel and AMD.
Then of course they neglect to say that in the low-power notebook market, the CPU only consumes about 25% of the power. So even if they reduce their power consumption to 0, they could only improve battery life by 33%.
I think you are misinterpreting the arguments. People seem to me to be saying they don't want to take a serious performance hit if all they are getting in return is a small power savings.
they are slashdotted, so here it is :)
(posting as anonymous coward, since this is
obviously karma whoring
Toshiba questions Transmeta power claims
Toshiba has poured cold water on Transmeta's claims about the low power consumption and heat generation of its Crusoe chip, despite the fact that it is an investor in the chip startup.
Transmeta claims that Crusoe increases battery life in lightweight notebooks to eight hours, more than doubling the two to four hours provided by equivalent Intel chips. It also claims that notebooks running the chips are quieter as Crusoe does not need noisy cooling fans.
However, Steve Crawley, Toshiba UK's product marketing manager, said that the company had no plans to introduce Crusoe into future Toshiba products.
"[Crusoe] does give a reasonable increase in battery life, but nothing like Transmeta's publicity is claiming. The back light consumes a lot of power - one quarter of the power is used pushing light out. Realistically, in sub-notebooks it gives a 30 to 40 per cent increase in battery life," he said.
He added that Toshiba currently has prototypes of ultra-light notebooks with eight hour battery life using Intel rather than Transmeta chips. "This can be done with a standard Intel box," he said.
"It is an interesting technology but at the moment we are not convinced it offers the user what is required. It will be very interesting to see if it can add any significant value to the end user in terms of battery life or thinness," he said.
But Transmeta contested Toshiba's claim, saying its eight hour notebook was too heavy to be classed as an ultra-light device.
Ed McKernan, director of marketing at Transmeta, said: "Toshiba's eight hour battery life today requires a 2.2lbs battery attached to the base of their Portege 3440 and 3480 notebooks. This means that [it] ends up weighing 5.61lbs - which is outside the ultra-light category of 2lbs to 4lbs."
"Transmeta's Crusoe processor is today being designed into products that will arrive in the fourth quarter and first quarter [of next year] with all day battery life. In addition, it is providing relief to original equipment manufacturers and designers that must deal with the heat caused by the hot processors - even Intel's 'one watt' processor," he added.
Toshiba agreed a licensing deal with Transmeta in February 1998, following the signing of a similar deal with IBM in December 1997. The deals, which gave Transmeta access to IBM and Toshiba technology in return for the right to use Transmeta technology in x86 products, provided the startup with much of its early revenue.
Transmeta subsequently reacquired the rights granted to IBM and Toshiba to manufacture and market x86 compatible products. It agreed to pay IBM a total of $33m over the next four years and issued 600,000 shares of common stock to Toshiba. IBM and Toshiba retain a licence to manufacture, market and sell non-x86 compatible products incorporating the licensed technology.
Intel and AMD are likely to take other approaches, and improve power consumption. Perhaps they will not get as favorable results, but "close enough" is good here, much as with horseshoes and nuclear hand grenades.
Having a CPU that consumes ten times less power is of limited value if the hard drive and LCD display still suck (power).
When Transmeta pushes that the CPU consumes vastly less power just makes Toshiba look bad if Toshiba can't make all the other components consume less power.
"Politically," this is probably what they're pushing back at...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
One of the primary reasons for the lower power consumption claimed by Transmeta is that the chip area is much smaller - Pentium compatibility is achieved in software instead of transistors.
Wait a second... doesn't a smaller chip area mean that it's supposed to be significantly cheaper, too?
I guess it could have been much cheaper than a Pentium, but they have a huge investment to cover so they are going for a high-margin market by targeting manufacturers that desperately need something other than price - lower power consumption.
So what do you do if the CPU isn't the only power hog around?
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
So Toshiba's backlight is a power hog and that's Transmeta's fault?
You don't understand. The question is not one of "fault" -- we are not trying to find somebody to blame. The question is whether it makes sense to make long and expensive efforts in order to reduce the CPU power consumption when it may not be all that important. Especially given that it involves performance trade-off.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Why would Toshiba diss a company they have invested in before the IPO if their claims do not have substance?
Unlike movie stars, stocks usually are affected negatively by bad publicity and react well to good publicity. For Toshiba to damage potential payoffs from a successful IPO by badmouthing Transmeta must indicate that all is not kosher with the Intel killer.
Hanlon's Razor
I mean take a look at Intel and RDRAM.. RDRAM is 8x more expensive than PC133 SDRAM and yet performes only marginally better (from what i have seen through numerous benchmarks). It's pretty obvious that RDRAM is a sub-par tech that Intel invested in and Intel seems to be QUITELY moving away from RDRAM... however u don't see Intel denouncing RDRAM by officially saying "RDRAM sux, we trying to phase out the usage of it, but we are trying to save face".
Assuming what i say is true, what reason would Toshiba have to do this right before TM's IPO? Now i'm not a big fan of consiracy theories, but it looks like there might have been a falling out between Toshiba and TM. Something like "Ok TM u fuc*ed us over, now we are going to fuc* u over by screwing up your IPO".
To me, i think that BECAUSE Toshiba is an investor in TM, it lends them LESS credibility to say things that will give TM (and therefore themselves) bad PR.
Of course in the end the technology will have to stand on its own two feet... only a released TM chip can disprove what Toshiba has said.
Ceres
So Toshiba's backlight is a power hog and that's Transmeta's fault?
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
The problem with Transmeta is that their entire business plan depends on being bought up by Microsoft. The bait is Linus. They want to use him so M$ will buy up the company and make him work 2 days a week at a minimum wage job so he and his family starve to death in the valley. This is why minimum wage should be $80 / hour, so all those people raising their families working only a couple days a week can afford to live in dignity.
How do I know all this, well let's just say that I have nice paychecks coming from two of the companies in my comment, but I won't say which.
I think what Toshiba may be discovering is that the semi-software solution to running CPU registers may not be the best solution to run operating systems reasonably fast.
Besides, note that Intel recently has made massive strides in reducing the battery drain of their Celeron/Pentium III CPU's designed for laptop operation. And AMD is heading towards that direction by going to a 0.13-micron process for their mobile Duron/Athlon CPU's to be released within the next 18 months.
Transmeta will have to crank up the speed of their CPU's substantially if they are to stay competitive against these new generations of AMD and Intel mobile CPU's.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Maybe Transmeta can get out of the processor business and invent a technology that prevents sites from getting slashdotted. Oh, wait, there allready is such a technology, its called mirroring!
Geoff
I think people should probably reserve judgment until units actually start to ship. Only by observing the real world performance, both at the CPU/throughput level and the power management level, will we really know if Crusoe will live up to the hype.
;-)
I for one can't wait to get my hands on a unit to evalutate. Hey, a good battery test would be to run the Q3 Quaver demo over and over and over....hey, if the Crusoe really does optimize on the fly, then my framerates should get higher with each interation!
Bit of a strange thing to do considering Toshiba were one of the original investors, but hey, thats corps for you
"Hey thats corps" what is this supposed to mean. Toshiba have one of the best hardware R&D arms around and were as stated one of the people behind Transmeta.
How about this for an idea....
Transmeta is good, but not that good, its not a revolution its just pretty good. The hype accorded to Transmeta is way out of kilter with its proven ability. Look at ARM, years of deployment from StrongARM 64 bit in servers down to hand-helds. So what have Transmeta actually DONE ? Very little indeed and yet judging by the hype hear on Slashdot they are the successor to Intel, they will triumph, their technology is much better than anyone elses.
Now look at how Microsoft hyped Win2K before and after its release. Do you see a difference ? The only one I see is that MS have delivered something.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Maybe Toshiba are just annoyed it didn't work out for them...
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The Anti-Blog
So what is Transmeta for now?
8 hours? Bah. A MacPortable got 4-6. And it's carrying case would hold a second batterry.
And 2.2 lbs? so what. The batteries were 5 or 6 lbs--quite handy as a security measure: if someone tried to steal it from you, you pulled the battery out of the case, and let them run off. Cassually follow them until they tire from teh weight, and then hit them over the head with the spare battery.
:)
hawk
Would they? Given the Linus' standing, would we care as much about Transmeta if he wasn't involved? Is a lot of the interest in Transmeta because of Linus works there or is it because there's this huge demand for low power CPUs? The way I read Transmeta stories/postings/etc its as if we'd never seen a low-power CPU before and we were all running computers that needed two-phase 208v and air conditioning.
You'd think if it was just low power CPUs people would be into all kinds of StrongARM solutions (not that some aren't, mind you, but there's no Linus mystique). I know the emulation, which is only x86 as of yet anyway, part is cool but at the same time I can't help but think that its 50% cool tech, 50% Linus worship.
If I was to buy a K6-II+ notebook and a Transmeta notebook (assuming that the transmeta didn't cost twice as much which is likely will, from what I hear) which one would be faster? If I buy a Sony VAIO with a Celeron or P3 in it and a Transmeta notebook, which will be faster? Are these supposed to be Cadillac notebook chips? Or "working man's" notebook chips?
Next, if I was to treat the Transmeta part like an embedded chip. How cheap can a wireless webpad with Linux and mozilla on it be? How long do the batteries last? Can I plug my Nokia PCS phone in to it? Yeah, these are all product specific questions. The big one is "how cheap?" I'm not going to buy a $1000 web pad when I will be able to buy a $1000 K6-II notebook ($800-$1200 is what they are aiming for with the k6-II+.) The TM chips are supposed to cost in the $70 range in quantity so I'm guessing you're not going to see many $300 TM based products.
There is a fair amount of information on the processor but I still feel like the important real world information is missing. I also feel like TM has been kind of deceptive with it, if they had a cheaper, lower power process that delivers the same performance they would be banging that gong to no end. They don't, it's either more expensive or it's slow, or both. It also kind of feels like they are moving slow. I know it's a first rev of their part but since that first press conference it has almost been long enough for rev 2 to be nearing the end of the pipeline. Something else that they should be hyping, especially if their first rev is an underachiever, that's expected but it's what you follow up with that makes or breaks you.
It's all very cool none the less, I hope they do well. More competition is better.
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The big criticism seems to be performance. I see this as a complete non-issue, but then again I'm not a compulsive upgrader.
Just two years ago, I was doing serious day-job work with a 200MHz Pentium running Windows NT. I had no speed complaints whatsoever. I'm currently doing software development for a _large_ project using a 400MHz Pentium II. It's plenty fast for my needs (which includes lots of heavy compiling). I also have a 333MHz Pentium II at home, which I use for running Lisp, doing 3D modelling, compiling, and graphic arts work. No speed complaints from me. It's a very snappy system, even running Windows 95. (I'd switch to Linux if I could find a desktop environment that didn't drag performance down to sub-Windows levels. Even so, I still have a 2M Linux partition that gets the occasional use.)
Now, most of the Transmeta detractors are complaining because Intel and AMD are beating them in the raw speed department. But then I realize that even Transmeta's low-end chips are running at outrageous clock speeds, giving performance better than any machine I typically use. That's enough for me. More speed than I know what to do with. Very low power consumption. Please, get these into inexpensive notebooks ASAP.
Apple's G3 laptops, on the other hand, have battery lives that are two to three times longer than Wintel laptops. That suggests that Crusoe and the old G3 are similar in computation per unit power. Of course, Apple/Motorola has gone the other direction with G4. It has a huge die to accommodate the SIMD instructions in the Altivec. Power consumption has skyrocketed. Still, Apple's MPEG DVD playing demonstration with the G3 is a great benchmark for a computer.
It's clear that Transmeta began as an academic exercise in exploring a new kind of computer chip that converted the instructions on the fly. They were entranced with the possibilities of doing pre-processing of instructions at the time of execution. This gives them some neat benefits, but they're not huge ones. After a bit, the Transmeta folks gave up singing that their processor was going to go faster and started hyping the power consumption.
It's not clear to me that Transmeta hasn't used any techniques that can't be easily ported to the latest model of the Pentium. So we'll see what happens.
I would also take Toshiba's decision with a grain of salt. There are plenty of other big companies with good engineeer who are still behind Transmeta.