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: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. :)

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Evan