Slashdot Mirror
A Transmeta Couplet
Godfather writes: "According to the heise-people the 600-MHz-TM5600 performs somewhere in between a Pentium III-400 and a Pentium III-600. It seems to be amazingly fast in memory access. The article is in German so you have to try the fish." A better translation would be appreciated, too, since Babelfish still leaves certain things murky. And if you've heard enough about the upcoming Picturebook, Timothy Brown writes: "Fujitsu is releasing (in early November) the Loox-T laptop, with a 500Mhz Crusoe chip. It's only available in Japan, but Dynamism, a company which sells Japan stuff to purchasers in the U.S., is accepting preorders." Here's that link.
Boycott this translation! Babelfish is closed source! You should be using GPLTrans instead! We cannot let the corporate hegemony of Slashdot dictate our translation ways! [recommended moderation: funny] But eh seriously... why doesn't GPLTrans ever get mentioned? I find in most of the cases with these non-english articles, it produces much more readable text than MangleFish.
Has anyone actually used one of those things? I currently am using a Sony Viao F409. It has a 650mhz PIII w/15" display. Very nice, and with 2 batteries I get almost 4 hours out of the thing (Its floppy drive swaps out for an optional second battery).
Pro's of a big laptop: It's nice when it's actually on your desk, cables all undone, plugged in, re-set my network connection settings.. (I don't use DHCP in the office or at home lan). Booted the machine, plugged in my external mouse and keyboard. (No docking station for me!)
The Picturebook seems nice, with exception that you don't have the large screen. (Only a half-hight ??). This might be ok if you are plugging into a monitor at the home/office
I have upgraded my machine to 256 megs of ram which is really nice, and I have RedHat 6.2 working nicely with my USB mouse. The main problem is getting my External monitor to work correctly in XWindows, but maybe that is probably more due to my ignorance in XWin configuration than the laptop.
I guess, the whole point of my babeling.. I have purchased and invested in what I thought would be the 'Dream' laptop. It's fast and nice with a great display that runs linux very nice... As now I spend really no time programming and all my time doing network diagrams, technical specifications and network administration on it.
But despite all the great hardware on this laptop, the reality is
Anyway, this is from someone that has invested a very large amount of memory into a laptop. Frankly I am a bit disapointed and am considering a picturebook to replace it.
Has anyone got any real practical experience using a picturebook? It sounds to me that the battery life/size and ease of porting it around. (Just toss it in my rook-sack and take it, battery lasts the whole working day and bring it home and charge it!) No cables.. etc.
Anyway, don't want to run down a fools paradise.
;-)
--------------------
> The "real" CPUID command, (compatible to the AMD-Athlon) returns no Serial-Number back.
Interesting - I thought the AMD Athlon has no CPUID `feature' - there was old recent issues with Red Hat 6.2 and Athlons, where the kernel would detect a PIII compatible chip pthis was before Red Hat started doing Athlon Kernerls] and attempt to disable the CPUID feature. Following finding a PIII, thre kernel would try to turn of CPUID [yay kernel people!] and die horrible, because AMD Athlons apparently didn't have one.
Or do they?
So we have a study of performance on NT, ONE study. As anyone who has been following benchmarking issues (c.f. recent IIS vs. Apache on Dell) will know, we can't really guess anything from this test.
What would be VERY nice is if some enterprising lab got together (ArsTechnica, overclockers.com etc.?), played with this beasty with a number of configs, a number of OSs (NT, Linux, BeOS, BSD, etc), and ripped out a few stats.
Hey, even a comparitive IIS vs. Apache on THIS machine would be fun. How would PHP work with all of this code-morphing cache stuff?
Still, I have to wonder how much input Linus has in all - the focus at the press release time was VERY much on NT, except for the embarrassing Quake moment. Anyone know of a publicly available set of Linux tests on one of these?
Can't wait 'til the webpads though. That'll sort out the "debian on iPaq" trolls...
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
Another interesting fact is that the Crusoe processor supplies a serial number via CPUID... The "true" CPUID command (compatible with the AMD Athlon) does not yield a serial number.
I don't get it. They want to appear "privacy friendly" by not implementing the Intel Pentium III CPUID serial number code, but they are still per-cpu identifiable.
Which will come first, the big Linux-world outcry that Linus Torvalds works for a privacy sellout, or a piece of software that sniffs the Crusoe's cpuid-stained butt to target ads more effectively?
[
Well, my english is not perfect, so please bear with me =).
I hope this translation is better than what the fish blurps.
<Translation>
The TM5600-Processor of Transmeta (used in the Sony Vaio) has to prove itself in the c't-Test-Facality right now.
First Benchmark results show that the performance of 600-MHz-TM5600 is between the
performance of a PIII 400 (while using the Appleman-testprogram, with about 15 Million iterations / sec)
and a PIII 600.
The Memory performance is pretty good for such a small Notebook,
it starts with 60 MByte/s (MemCopy) , and goes up with Cache-Hits in the Translation buffer (to 170 MByte/s).
Writing to the Memory (using Memset) is at about 280 MByte/s.
To compare:
Pentium III 500 (Via-Apollo-II-Chipsatz) writes with 70 Mbyte/s and 150 Mbyte/s.
Pentium-III-Coppermine-800 (Solano-i815-Board) is about as good, with 190 MByte/s and 255 MByte/s.
An interesting thing is, that the Crusoe-Processor responds to the CPUID command. (Cannot be disabled in the Vaio.
But the Serial-Number seems to be calculated by the Code-Morphing-Software.
The "real" CPUID command, (compatible to the AMD-Athlon) returns no Serial-Number back.
There is no correct working CMPXCH8 command in the official specs,
because Windows NT depends on the wierd behavior of a non correct CMPXCH8 if it detects a Pentium-Family CPU (Family -ID 5)
(my note: AFAIK Intel first implemented a non RCF CMPXCH8 command)
</Translation>
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
Crusoe in the c't labs
Transmeta's TM5600 processor (built into a Sony Vaio) is currently undergoing c't labs' scrutiny. The first benchmark results put it into the range between a Pentium III-400 (e.g. the c't Mandelbrot fractal at about 15 million iterations per second) and a Pentium III-600. Memory performance is impressive for a small notebook, starting with about 60MB/s for MemCopy and increasing to about 170MB/s for cache hits within the processor's translation buffer. Write performance (measured via Memset) peaks at about 280MB/s. In comparison, a Pentium III-500 with Via-Apollo-II chipset won't reach more than 70MB/s and 150MB/s, respectively. A Pentium III-Coppermine-800 on a Solano i815 board comes in close at 190 and 255MB/s.
Another interesting fact is that the Crusoe processor supplies a serial number via CPUID, which cannot be disabled, at least in the Vaio configuration. This serial number seems however to be generated exclusively by the code-morphing software. The "true" CPUID command (compatible with the AMD Athlon) does not yield a serial number. Additionally, Transmeta declared the otherwise flawlessly functional CMPXCHG8 command as not available in the list of official features, since Windows NT can't cope with a Pentium-class processor (family ID 5) supplying this feature.
Further benchmarks and power consumption measures will be published by c't during the next week.