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Crusoe: new benchmarks
C'T has published some new TM5600 benchmarks. Sony's new Vaio notebook uses 10W per hour to power 128 Mb of RAM (112 Mb useable), a 12 Gb Hard-drive, an ATI Rage Mobility Gfx controller and a 9 inch display (resolution: 1024 x 480). This compares with 15-22W for a normal notebook with a bigger display. Intel's Pentium III was usually 50 percent faster at a given frequency, but sometimes virtually no faster and sometimes twice as fast. Code-morphing's impact was measurable: some programs (Quake III and pov run on desk.pov) ran 10-20 percent faster the second time they were run.
this is not a real 9" display with the 4:3 aspect ratio we are used to. this display is 1/2 the size of a real 9" display at 4:3.
i want to see power specs on a real laptop with a real display, not a palmtop with a 9" x 3" display.
While I'm initially disappointed; most geeks know that a very large chunk of laptop power goes into the screen, and another into the hard drive. Silly as it may sound, considering the performance hit you take by using this chip over the real-deal (Pentium), and considering the power savings is watered down because of the screen and HD, maybe MP would be the way to go. . .
Of course, I've heard wonderful things about PPC-based laptops, and how very much more efficient they are with batteries. If only Moronola would get off their butts and ramp clock speed. ("twice as fast" argument doesn't wash when clock speed is half as fast).
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What machines would these be? While the StrongARM uses less power then the Crosue, most of that 10W isn't the CPU. I don't think we will get a 1W laptop until hard drives are replaced by something that sucks less power, DRAM gets replaced by MRAM, and most importantly we can make the big power sucking LCD backlight go away, or at least make it much smaller (like an eyeglasses backlight....).
Until then our power sippers will be palm pilot like displays with no backlight most of the time, very little RAM, and no hard drive...
Oh, I didn't mean to pick on the SA because it sucks a watt. I actually thought it sucked more like half that. I was trying to say that replacing the crosue with another CPU in a 10W box will only give you at best a 8W box (assuming the Crosue sucks 2W, and the new CPU zero).
So to suck dramitically less we either have to go the Palm Pilot route and drop the hard drive, most of the ram, and lots of other stuff...or find a way to get all that other stuff to sip power rather then gulp it.
They tend to run slower as well, I picked the StrongARM because it was in the same ballpark (even if it's integer performance is likely to be halfish the Crouse, and the FP will be abysmal because it has no FPU). The Xscale would have been better, but I didn't think of it at the time.
Yep, as long as you don't need x86 compatability it is better then the Crosue. Then again something almost allways beats the x86 if you don't need x86 compatability (well it has price/performace going for it in some price and performace bands, but I'm wondering offtopic...).
DISCLAIMER: I am not a kernel hacker, so I might have some factual errors in the text below. Kernel hackers: Feel free to correct me.
It does bad things if the clock rate varies, as this affects micro-delay loops that are used when talking to certain (broken) peripherals. The execution speed of the instructions varies even on true Intel parts. The kernel has two mechanisms to cope with this, and the important one should work fine on Transmeta.
(Reference: arch/i386/lib/delay.c in the kernel source.)
The older mechanism is the BogoMIPS busy loop. This mechanism relies on a tight loop that fits in cache and should run with fixed behavior on a given device. This mechanism probably doesn't work real well on a Transmeta part, though I suspect Code Morphing would hit steady state real soon and so the BogoMIPS loop wouldn't be hurt too badly. Still, it's suboptimal. That leads me to the second mechanism.
The newer mechanism which is available on most modern CPUs is the Time Stamp Counter, which returns a cycle count rendered in terms of CPU clock cycles. As long as you know the MHz rate of the CPU, you can measure time very accurately. Presumably, despite the Code Morphing layer, the Transmeta CPU will return a meaningful, coherent clock count for this instruction.
The problem with varying clock rates is that the time-base for the BogoMIPS or TSC clock change and the kernel isn't notified. In theory, the Transmeta could actually just use a fixed-rate counter for the TSC whose time-base didn't vary as the CPU's clock-rate varied, thus fixing the problem entirely. But then, that'd make too much sense. ;-)
As for HLT, I thought Linux did that already? That's how come my CPU stays nice and ice cold when I'm not running my Distributed Net client. A quick look at arch/i386/kernel/process.c shows the uniprocessor idle loop calling __asm__("hlt"); as long as the CPU supports it.
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Crusoe: Not the fastest one, but economically
[ 11,10,2000 17:13 ]
For some days the c't laboratory measures the efficiency of the TM5600-Prozessor von Transmeta[1 ] . After the first results to the Speicher-Performance[2 ] now further results of bench mark are certain.
The Crusoe is 12 GByte fixed disk, ATI in the Sony Notebook Vaio PCG-C1VE[3 ] with 128 MByte primary storages, rises up Mobility and a 9-Zoll-Display with 1024 x 480 points dissolution. The processor runs alternatively with 300 mc/s with 1.2 V of core voltage or 600 mc/s with 1.6 V and can be switched during operation between both frequencies. It does not have 128 KByte Level-1 and 256 KByte Level-2-Cache. x86-Code can it execute directly, but translates it beforehand into its internal VLIW instruction set (very long INSTRUCTION word). In order not to repeat this process continuously, the Crusoe stores the translated code in a code Morphing memory. In addition it zwackt itself 16 MByte from the primary storage, so that for the operating system and applications only 112 MByte remain remaining.
In the case of 300 mc/s the c't Akkubenchmark results in a run time of approximately two hours. Sony indicates the Akku capacity as approximately 20 Wh. Therefore the Notebook takes up altogether only about 10 Watts of performance - quite considerably, most Notebooks between 15 and 22 Watts goennen itself nevertheless. In the efficiency comparison the Crusoe remains certainly behind one fast clocked mobile Pentium III clearly:
Processor
Clock
[ mc/s ] BAPCo
SYSMark 2000 PovRay 3.1
chess2.pov 3DMark 2000
CCU Marks UT
[ fps ] Cinema
4d
Crusoe 300 31 124 PPS 33 8,4 1,8
Crusoe 600 50 257 PPS 56 11,8 3,7
Pentium III 500 86 347 PPS 78 14,9 5,5
Pentium III 600 92 417 PPS 81 15,4 6,6
Comparative measurements on Acer TravelMate 522 TXV with Pentium III-600 (with speed steps), 128 MByte primary storages and likewise the ATI rise up Mobility.
Some bench mark we let run several times consecutively, in order to observe the influence code of the Morphing (translate of x86-Maschinencode into Crusoe instruction). In the theory a bench mark should run with the second time faster, since the processor can fall back to the Morphing memory and again not translate the code must. In practice this effect actually shows up with some bench mark: Thus the Frame rate of Quake III of 13,5 rose fps by 10 per cent to 14,9 fps in the second run. PovRay calculated " desk.pov " in the first passage in 20 seconds and needed with the repetitions only 16 seconds. (both measured with 300 mc/s.)
However the results remained by the 3DMark 2000, unreal Tournament or the " chess2.pov"-Berechnung von PovRay constantly and also most individual values of the BAPCo Suite varied only around the two per cent usual with all systems. This bench mark execute obviously most program sections anyway already several times, so that the rate advantage enters with the repeated passing through of a code paragraph bench mark result also. For example the BAPCo Einzeltest " Elastic Reality " consists mainly of calculating 150 frames. According to the first picture the code should be situated completely in the Morphing memory, so that the Crusoe can calculate the further 149 pictures with max. rate. Code the Morphing would have to go already extremely slowly, in order to measure an influence here.
Further results follow in the c't output 22/00 (starting from 23 October in the trade). ( jow[4 ] / c't)
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Lithium polymer batteries have started hitting the market--the iPaq uses them, for one, and my new cell phone does as well. With their significantly higher energy density and the Crusoe's power-saving, we'll be seeing laptops with a running time of 6-8 hours--or to put it another way, laptops with a running time of 4 hours that have virtually no battery. This still isn't enough, and definitely isn't worth the 50% performance hit reported on some applications.
In my experience, the biggest power drains on a mobile system are (of course) the display and the CD-ROM/DVD drive. I'm waiting for a new display technology (light-emitting polymer, for example) that will make more difference than the Crusoe or lithium polymer combined.
So, the chip is much slower than the p3, and extrapolating from the provided numbers, if you fit it with a real screen (not the ridiculous PDA size this benchmark has been run with) it sucks almost as much power as the aforementioned vanilla p3 notebook, and probably more or less the same as a p3 notebook at half of the Crusoe's clock speed (since that's a comparable speed given its performance).
/. community is much more forgiving.
Can anybody explain me what's the point of all the hoopla that has been going on about this ? If Intel or AMD created a processor like this they would be fried and grilled here, but since it's Linus' employer I have the feeling that the
Don't get me wrong, from a company that has never produced CPUs the Crusoe is an excellent first product, but I fail to see why this should be hailed as the second coming or something.
Am I being too cynical ?
-- the cake is a lie
How do you use 10W per hour? Considering that is a rating of power (energy per unit time), not energy.
On the other hand, the article failed to mention the size of the screen on the P!!! laptop, along with what effect the 9" screen had on the Crusoe's power consumption. Considering the power the screen consumes, and how small 9" is compared with the size of a normal notebook screen, that could be very relevant.
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It seems that now other components of this notebook are guilty of the most power usage, so the focus should turn to other high-energy devices. What are these? My first couple guesses are the display screen and the hard drive. Here's a good application for those goggles that have a videoscreen built into them (so that a regular-sized monitor appears before your eyes). Those things can't use very much energy, do they? So use that for a display. I'd be interested to see how long the battery lasts then. Carl hi mom
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Somehow, testing this processor in a system with a tiny display doesn't seem like a very good way to compare it to a realistic real world notebook. (Sure, some people may buy this, but the display seems too small for many real world applications.)
OK, we're dealing with laptops and webpads.
Based on batteries coming out of B.C. right now, I'd say Transmeta can cut the power on a system with color video screens and CD to about 80-90% of current usage. If you beef up the RAM to the gills, probably 70-85% power usage.
Main drain is monitor power for most people - fastest method to cut this is better screen technology. Time to market of useable low-power high-res screen is probably 2002-2003 product cycle. This will still leave you at 50-60%.
Not a lot of hope on the CD power usage.
On the other hand, a non-CD Ethernet laptop, with honking big RAM and improved hard drive could probably cut power consumption down to 25-30% of current usage. This is with a total redesign. Expect to see these babies in late 2002. Price mark will be high until early 2004.
[Note - I am expecting to put in an indication of interest for TMTA IPO shares - I am biased]
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Half the display size (vertically), half the processor speed, half the power consumption... I think they should ship OS/2 with that thing, just for the bad pun.
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