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.

Comments

The Problem with Transmeta

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Here is the article

[dattaway]

I hear the backlight argument suggesting the power consumption by the CPU is not too important when it comes to battery life. Could someone please explain why the underside of my notebooks feel like toaster ovens in my lap, sometimes leaving burns if I'm wearing my shorts? I'm not joking about the burns.

This is right underneath the CPU area, but the whole underside of the laptop gets nice and toasty too. Nothing like a nice, sweaty laptop. The Crusoe processors might be a nice change.

Crusoe not running up to hype?

[RayChuang]

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.

Well try something new

[geoffeg]

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

Real World Testing Needed

[dreamchaser]

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! ;-)

Slashdot is Microsoft.....

[MosesJones]

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.

Sour grapes?

[deefer]

Is it possible that Transmeta haven't delivered what Toshiba wanted? IIRC, the Crusoe was supposed to be blisteringly quick and consume little power. Now it is released, it is just low power consumption processor.
Maybe Toshiba are just annoyed it didn't work out for them...

Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.

Microsoft Involved?

[Christianfreak]

I heard on CNN yesterday that Microsoft's new chip for set-top and hand-held devices would be made by Toshiba, is it possible they are whining now so when they introduce M$oft's chip all other compeditors are discredited?

Never knock on Death's door:

Redirection to nowhere

[Animats]

Remember that the original idea behind Transmeta was supposed to be that just-in-time recompilation to a cleaner architecture would yield higher performance with a simpler CPU. That didn't work out. Then the emphasis was on reducing power consumption, which was a niche Intel hadn't addressed aggressively enough. But it's not that Transmeta's CPUs really use less power when working; it's just that they have more standby modes for when they're not. That's something the other manufacturers can easily address if they want to, because that's independent of the "code morphing" stuff. So we'll probably see more standby modes, and more OS support for them, in the mainstream CPUs.

So what is Transmeta for now?

old, old news :)

[hawk]

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 Transmeta be as top of mind without Linus?

[swb]

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.

What do we really know about the parts?

[Mr T]

They been sampling chips, there are prototype products made out of them and I still don't know anything real about it's performance. Their homepage has this odd ball performance/power consumption type benchmarking information.

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.

Too much moaning about performance

[Junks Jerzey]

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.

Crusoe is Far from Perfect-- And Heavily Hyped

[westfirst]

The Crusoe Processor has many things going for it, but it is far from the only machine on the market. The earliest power benchmarks they released suggested that it could do 2 to 3 times the computation with the same amount of power as a Pentium chip. Well, that's not exactly the best comparison. Intel's never really worked at saving power too much and the Pentium line is well known as a power hog.

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.