Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

A Transmeta Couplet

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the payoff-money-arrived dept.

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.

1 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Full translation by pnambic · · Score: 5

    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.