Fujitsu Coming Out With Crusoe Machines

Pulzar writes: "Fujitsu will release two notebooks containing Crusoe processors from Transmeta in November, the company said today, bringing the total number of companies coming out with Transmeta-based products to seven."

Comments

Re:I'm superficial

[arivanov]

You mean "I need numbers"?

I want to see thee very very very simple things:

1. network pipe over loopback under linux (memory to memry + some CPU).
2. standard mysql benchmark test
3. linux kernel compile for a reasonably populated .config

In btw: I do not want top notch performance as the laptop disks and IO will cripple it anyway. I just want to finally see what a hell are we talking about.

Think about what "slow" means in this case

[Junks Jerzey]

The speed complaints need to be taken with a grain of salt. The comments are mostly from people with 500 horsepower cars, complaining that 300 horsepower cars are slow and worthless.

Stop and consider some of the most impressive high-tech games of the 1990s: Quake, Flight Unlimited, Mario 64, System Shock. Now look back at what kind of top of the line machines were being used for the development of those games. Quake was wrapped up when 90 and 120 MHz Pentiums were the best you could get, for example. Now suppose you could have told the developers of these games about a chip with:

* A raw clock speed 3.5 times higher.
* A much faster bus (100 vs. 66 MHz).
* A much larger cache.
* A significantly better processor design featuring out of order execution and less need to pipeline by hand.
* 3D video cards at least 5x faster than what was being sold in $100,000 SGI machines in 1995. (Remember, in 1995 software rendering was the norm.)

That machine is a 333 MHz Pentium II with a Voodoo 2 card. Can you imagine the power? Wow, could you develop some mind boggling games on such a box. And most people are just surfing, downloading porn and MP3s, and using Word. Fast forward, and now we have people putting down 400-500MHz as "slow crap." Personally, I'd take a Crusoe that gave equivalent performance to such a machine, especially considering that it would be cheaper and use much less power. Blindly going for more megahertz is not the way to progress.

Re:What's the point?

[JabberWokky]

The cost of that, however, is that a large portion of operations occur in software which yields for slower performence than the competition.

sigh If you don't know how a CPU works, please just stay out of the Crusoe pool.

Your nice Intel (or AMD, or Cyrix or other) chip performs all its calculations in software - or just as much as the Crusoe does.

Which is to say, each opcode is broken down into microcode, which is then translated to circutry on the actual chip. Generally, once you get past the opcode level, you stop calling it software.

What the Crusoe has is the ability to manipulate the microcode programming realtime. In a Pentium, or AMD, or any other chip (including those RISC chips that are not really so RISC anymore), that microcode programming is fixed and can't change. In Crusoe, the potential is for the chip to adapt and allocate internal, on-chip resources to the current task.

In a simplified way, when you play MP3s, the chip takes on the characteristic of a dedicated MP3 decoder. When you run SETI at Home, it takes on the characteristics of a dedicated SETI chip. When you run Windows, it takes on the characteristics of Rodney Dangerfield.

The simple fact is that the Crusoe chip offers loads of potential, has a great idea that should be explored, and looks like it came out (in the first batch) slower than the competition, so they tried to pitch the (coincidental) lightweight power consumption.

Incidently, they were right about one thing. Normal benchmarks are not applicable to this category of processor. You can't measure it by running through a set of simple computations for a short amount of time (milliseconds). If you do, it won't adapt. In real life usage, however, you are more likely to be running KWord or Quake III for more than a few milliseconds, giving it time to reconfigure to an optimal setting.

With today's huge advance in hardware, I don't see much use for such "software oriented" chips.

Yeah. Down with software. Firmware's so much better. Gimmie the days of slapping in carts into the back of a TI computer. Who needs magnetic or optical media anyway. :)

--
Evan

Re:hmm

[Tet]

What is all this obsession with chip power usage? I would think the rest of the computer--hard drive, fan, monitor--would consume the lion's share of the battery.

Indeed, but if you can get the chip to run cool enough, you won't need a fan. A traditional CRT monitor uses so much power that there's no point using a low power chip on such a system. But that's not their market. They're being aimed at the portable market -- notebooks and webpad type devices. Yes, LCD screens still suck large amounts of power, but advances are being made in this area (hopefully LEP screens will have low power requirements). Also, consider the CPU in a set top box (e.g., a satellite or cable decoder box). How many people would put up with them if they needed a noisy fan in them? With its low power requirements, a Crusoe is ideal here, a market that's inaccessable to Intel and AMD (with their current offerings).