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Intel Pushes Low-Power Crusoe Challenger
axis-techno-geek writes: "It seems that Intel now is trying to fight back against Transmeta with their new chips. Intel plans to have their new speed-step Pentium III's out in about a year (which in computer time means about 18 months :)."
The Crusoe can dynamically change it's clock speed and power consumption i.e. if you are playing solitare, there is not much demand for power from the procesor so the clock speed will be reduced. If you are playing a DVD, the CPU demand will be high and thus, clockspeed will increase automatically to compensate.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Great, so what this is really saying is that it took some upstart startup to come up with a really good idea AND bring it all the way to market before Intel would get off it's ass and admit that just MAYBE a more power-efficient mobile processor was something that their customers NEED?!? This is a perfect example of WHY monopolies are a "bad thing".
Personally, I don't see this as being any great news from Intel. As far as I'm concerned, the most impressive thing about Crusoe isn't the fact that it's much better for battery life (though that's certainly a good thing, and it's about time SOMEONE did something about it), it's the code-morphing abilities of the chip. This chip has the ability to emulate any processor that TransMeta puts its mind to emulate. And this can be accomplished with SOFT patches (no more difficult that upgrading your BIOS). For now they have chosen to stick the the x86 market, which makes perfect sense. But Apple and Sun better look out, once they get themselves firmly established...
The c't benchmark says the TM4500 is equivalent to 500MHz, if you are talking about the story recently reported here on slahsdot. Where do you get your 233MHz figure from? What they say is bad is that unless you use APM, the the Crusoe consumes 5 watts...
Fight back against vaporware with more vaporware? Sounds like a fair fight to me.
-
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Ditzel says: [Speedstep] validates his company's approach to the market. This joke has been used so many times it's no longer funny.
As others have said here, Speedstep is not progress--it should be called "SpeedStumble" because it drops the clock frequency on battery power--it can't dynamically adjust the frequency depending on the CPU load, like Crusoe can.
The critical point here is if Intel can drop power consumption and thus heat production low enough to be able to do away with the fan. Laptops should not have fans, and should not be too hot to keep in your lap. With Crusoe (or other low-power CPUs) you don't need a fan--with Intel notebook CPUs you still do, so far.
When I was shopping for an electric heater to put in my drafty college apartment, I got a real kick out of something. Some of the boxes that the heaters came in were proudly labeled "100% efficient". I guess they made a safe bet that most consumers don't know anything about thermondynamics, and that those who do would simply chuckle.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Would this not work better than slowing down the clock?
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Wow! Intel's marketing division has really lost it! I could have sworn that the current 600Mhz speedstep PIII was supposed to consume 1 watt of power, and it says the peak usage will be around 1.5 watts of power for the "new" CPU. The 1 watt for the "old" model is probably an idle wattage, but they need to clarify some things. Now we will look at the various advantages that each CPU has behind it (The current PIII for laptops, as it is basically the same thing as the "new" one) The PIII has a moderate performance advantage over the Crusoe processor in standard applications. In my opinion this is almost irrelevant for most people, as I do some very heavy multitasking with regular apps (Word, IE, Excel, IE, IE, IE, Outlook Express, a couple instant messanger services, and some more copies of IE) and my Celeron 466 with 128 megs of ram is very snappy. FPU performance is better again for the PIII, but I would never think of playing a game on a laptop computer, as the LCD screens are generally bad, and the video chipsets worse for gaming. Also, in applications where FPU capability (CAD, many games) is the most important part of the computer are reserved for desktop computers. Crusoe uses a good deal less power then the current PIII, and offers very good general application performance. Another thing is the Longrun technology, which, unlike the PIII's speedstep (And like AMD's notebook technology), dynamically adjusts the clock speed so that even when you are on a battery you get very close to full performance of the CPU, whereas with Intel's solution, you are stuck with the lower speed. The Crusoe processor also intehrates the memory controller into the CPU core, which reduces the amount of power even more relative to the Intel CPU. The Intel CPUs also put out a good deal more heat then the Crusoe, which forces manufacturers into making heavier notebooks with fans, loaded with metal for use as a heatsink material, and heavier. I would imagine that with such a small die size, Transmeta could integrate all of the functions of the chipset into the CPU if they wanted, even further reducing power consumption, motherboard space, and cost. In my opinion the Crusoe processor will start a new revolution in the subnotebook industry. Instead of Subnotebooks having very poor performance and horrid battery life, they will be even lighter, have much better battery life, and offer decent performance. The only real issue I see with Transmeta is that they will suffer from the same problems AMD suffered from when their flagship processor was the K6-2. AMD's average selling price per processor was well under $100, and the budget CPU world is one of extremely slim profit margins. Transmeta will encounter a similar problem with Crusoe, so they will need to find a way to come out with a more high end product that will net them better profits. Lastly, AMD has their own fabs, so after the inital investment and operating costs, they don't need to pay any more for producing their CPU's, whereas a good chunk of income from selling Crusoe CPUs will go towards TSMC. Bottom line: Crusoe = revolutionary processor in many ways, but in a business sense they are lacking a way to truly make a good profit.
Only those who dream can grasp reality.
Then what was that "turbo" button on my 386 for?
It would seem the above links aren't helpful at this time, so here's a few that might shed some light in this already ageing news piece:
/news/0-1003-200-3156114.html?tag=st.ne.1002.thed. ni
- http://www.pcworld.com/news/ar tic le.asp?aid=31482
Also next year, Intel will probably announce an ultralow-voltage 500-MHz chip for subnotebooks that should be extremely battery-friendly. The company demonstrated a processor running at 300-MHz.
- http://www.zdnet.c om/ zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2639424,00.html
When Intel Corp.'s Frank Spindler disclosed that the chip giant is fast tracking the production of a new ultra-low-power chip for notebooks, there was an interested eavesdropper nearby.
- http://cnet. com
SAN JOSE, Calif.--Intel said it will enhance energy-saving features in processors for laptops and begin shipping new mobile Pentium chips next year as competition intensifies.
Sorry, but your link doesn't seem to work for me either. In fact, all my requests to lycos.com get me to lycos.de (it seems that German surfers are redirected to the German Lycos site). So stupid...
Can someone full-quote the thing for me, please?!
It's clear that Crusoe's LongRun technology is a more elegant approach
to conserving power by reducing clock speed than Intel's Speedstep,
but how much difference does it make in practice? It's quite possible
that Intel's crufty hack might give 90% of the benefit. I'm waiting
for independent tests...
When Intel Corp.'s Frank Spindler disclosed that the chip giant is fast tracking the production of a new ultra-low-power chip for notebooks, there was an interested eavesdropper nearby. Transmeta Corp. CEO David Ditzel was attending the Microprocessor Forum this week when Spindler, vice president and general manager of Intel's Mobile and Handheld Division, said that a new ultra-low-power Speedstep-based mobile Pentium III chip was in the works and should ship next year. The chips, which consume less power than current mobile Pentium IIIs with Speedstep Technology, are being moved into production sooner than originally planned to counter Transmeta's low-power Crusoe processor, which began shipping in notebooks in Japan last month. As for the eavesdropper, Ditzel said he was glad to hear Intel is addressing the low-power market segment, because it validates his company's approach to the market. With their low power consumption, Transmeta's low-power Crusoe processor and LongRun power-management software and Intel's forthcoming low-power Pentium III are designed to extend battery life for mini-notebooks to up to 12 hours. Intel officials concede that Transmeta did wonders for raising industry awareness of battery life. But, unlike Transmeta, Intel expects that the mini-notebook will account for only a small part of its overall mobile chip business, whereas more fully featured notebooks with larger screens, integrated drives, and faster processors will account for some 60 percent of sales. Shaving wattage According to Ditzel, the difference between Crusoe and the forthcoming Intel chips will be about a quarter of a watt. Crusoe chips on average consume about .5 to .75 watt; the forthcoming Intel chips will consume about half a watt on average. (Currently, Intel is shipping a 600MHz mobile Pentium III with Speedstep that consumes about one watt of power when running at 500MHz in its Battery Optimized Mode.)
Ditzel showed ZDNet News a Hitachi notebook with a 600MHz Crusoe TM5600 chip. The notebook, along with three similar models and a Crusoe-based Web Tablet, debuted in Japan on Sept. 27 and will be officially announced later this month in the United States.
Ditzel demonstrated how the Hitachi model scaled in 100Mhz increments from 300Mhz to 600MHz, but spent most of its time running at 300MHz unless it was loading an application or playing a movie. According to Ditzel, the notebook yields a battery life of between 10 to 12 hours.
Intel's first ultra-low-power Pentium III chip, due in the first half of next year, will be a 500MHz, which drops to 300MHz when on battery power. When running at 300MHz, the chip will consume about half a watt of power.
Active power consumption for the chip will be closer to 1.5 watts, Intel officials said. The chip's core voltage will drop to 1 volt, compared to the 1.1 volt of the current 600MHz low-power mobile Pentium III with Speedstep. A 600MHz version of the ultra-low-power mobile Pentium III is planned for the second half of the year.
Speedstep, which acts as a switch to drop clock speed and power consumption of a Pentium III running on battery power, is not dynamically variable like Crusoe, which can move through a number of clock-speed and power-consumption states based on demand from an application.
System-level approach Intel is also focusing on chip sets and other system components, including screens and batteries.
At the Microprocessor Forum the company demonstrated a version of its 440MX mobile chip set with active power management. The chip set's average power consumption was shown to be about half a watt, making the entire processor and chip set package average less than one watt. Intel is also investigating ways to get more life out of lithium-ion batteries and to reduce the power consumption of notebook screens. The company may make investments in companies working in those areas; however, it has not disclosed any such plans to date.
Transmeta's approach to system-level power management was to integrate the memory controller, a major part of a chip set, into its Crusoe 5XXX line of chips. This works to save both power and cost.
The first ultra-low-power mobile Pentium IIIs will be based on Intel's current 0.18-micron manufacturing process.
They "require nothing special in terms of manufacturing," one company official said.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
> Marketing geek: "someone else just released a great new revolutionary product. As a result, we need you engineers to design, test and impliment our version of the product before their's ships. Oh, by the way, we already announced ours is coming out in two weeks. Good luck"
Vapor for Athlon, vapor for Crusoe.
--
Give me a candidate who speaks out against the war on drugs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Who else could take something as technologically <sarcasm>innovative</sarcasm> as underclocking and give it a name like "Speedstep Technology"
But you missed the cool part - you can overclock it and get back to where you started!
They'll doubtless market that as the Speedstep Pro.
--
Give me a candidate who speaks out against the war on drugs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Intel recalls the 1.13 P3
AMD rolls out 1.1 and announces near term avail of 1.2 GHz Athlons.
Intel repurposes P4 systems after performance issues, show that tick for tick they run slower than P3, Athlon & Duron. (at least until they can shrink the die small enough to run at 2GHz which puts them on par with todays chips)
AMD announces SMP chip set with initial 2 way (this year) support for their Athlon line. And the SMP is higher bandwidth than current Intel systems...(Finally!!)
Micron's MAMBA DDR SDRAM chip set is announced for Athlon systems - with 8 MB built in cache!
Intel initial chipsets for the P4 will be RAMBUS ?
Now they are going after the Crusoe chipsets with more underclocking tech ?
No I have to admit my info may be flawed, as I have not been watching the processor news for the past 20 minutes, but it seems to me Intel is now fighting battles on all sides (in the CPU arena at least) and, at least right now, losing ground on most of the fronts. Of course if I were Intel I would be most concerned with Athlon SMP invading the traditional server and highend workstation market...but that's just me.
Forgot to take into account two things:
1. AMD has overtaken Intel on the "power-of-cpu" camp. This means that they're going to become more and more popular.
2. The law of exponential growth. AMD Should overtake Intel in less than 3 years. AMD's popularity is increasing by the day, while Intel is falling out of favour.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
The important question is "how fast will it respond"?
My biggest complaint with computers is how quickly they respond to the users. Quite often, low-power mode is a terrible culprit here, especially when the HD spins down. You move the mouse, click on something, and wait 30 seconds while the machine pulls it's head out of it's ass and spins up the hard disk. If you do this often enough (if the cylce is short enough) it probably takes more energy to spin-up the disk that it would have taken to continue running it (newton's second law anyone?); and makes me sit and wait for my $5000 new spiffy super-fast 1.4 GHz PIV (exaggerating, but nonetheless, point is made, no?).
I'm not saying this is bad, but I'm saying that it's USUALLY implemented to make things worse. If the chip goes INSTANTLY from 300 to 500MHz the very moment I start moving the mouse after letting it sit, then it's okay. But latency sucks. Which is probably why there are now strong arguments that a 500MHz CPU is enough for most people. It's not, but when you pay the extra dough for the 1.4 Ghz one, and you don't see a performance improvement for MOST day to day tasks, the problem is your suffering from latency, and often reading data that was not cached. Poor implementation.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I thought that the PPC could do this to. Not sure about power consumption, but I KNOW that the G4, and G3e will step down their speed if they get too hot, this is how Apple can ship computers without fans. Yes, convective cooling in a well-designed case DOES do the trick. But if it's too hot in the room, it's not as effective.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
remember the "turbo" button we used to have on all the 286's? From a rather pedestrian 10MHz to - whoopee! 14 MHz!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Wonder what their release schedule would have been pre-Transmeta?
Is there?
--SpookComix
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
1) I think that is because Windows doesn't use the HLT instructions, which not only prevent instructions from executing during idle loops, but cools the CPU down in the process.
4) You can never have enough speed. Not even on a laptop.
5) Uh, that would be hard.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Here's the right one.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
It seems that Intel now is trying to fight back against Transmeta with their new chips. Intel plans to have their new speed-step Pentium III's out in about a year...
Yeah, but will they look like barf?.
--Jim
The link is useless and I can't find anything mentioning low power chips from Intel at lycos. Congrats to the /. editors for checking the links in stories...
Mark Duell
...but isn't competition a violation of the DMCA?
We must stop piracy at all costs... including freedom.
According to Transmeta's figures, it runs like a P2 450. That's not `slow as hell' by comparison with Intels' 500Mhz...
Intel calls it "Speedstep technology". I call it underclocking. This is nothing new. The *really* sad part about all this is that it's going to take another year for this *amazing new technology* to be available.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
You're obviously confused: SpeedStep only offers you two different steps. Crusoe has a gradient (i.e. it can operate at a number of speeds between it's min and max speeds) and is much more intelligent about deciding what speed to run at. If not much is happening, it drops down a notch or two. If it needs more cycles, it hops up again. With Intel, it's all or nothing. And I think we all know that comparing raw clock speeds (MHz) is just crap. YES, a 600MHz Crusoe, performs on average more like a
Finally, keep in mind, a year from now, when Intel finally rolls out their "new" technology, Transmeta will more than likely have a new surprise.
and those of you who think thats all this is about obviously didnt read the message.... its about variable underclocking, with out need a reboot, and last i heard, there werent too many pc or laptops that could drop the clockspeed with out a reboot, let alone 2-4 different variations of clockspeed (crusoe). I had a toshiba pent200 laptop that could change clock rate on the fly with the push of a button, it was kinda cool, couse I could turn up the speed when I was playing a emulator or quake2
Personally, I like SpeedStep. With the Crusoe, you're going slow as hell all the time, because at a 600MHz clock, it performs like a P2 350. However, with the P3 SpeedStep, it limits itself to 500, then jumps up to the proper clock when you're plugged in. Also, you can override SpeedStep if you happen to get an extended battery pack or a weird long-life big-ass hybrid battery (I've heard of them on cameras, they should be useful for laptops). Of course, AMD won't be able to compete on the laptop front with Intel because the K6-2 just isn't fast enough, and the Athlon draws too much power. I've heard talk of a low-power Athlon for laptops, but I'll believe that when I see it.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I have a Dell inspirion 7500 lappy whichi I bought in March/April of this year. For the most part it is a great machine and the PIII processor clocks at 500mhz when on battery power and 600 when plugged in. I can't tell any real performance difference between the two modes and the battery times feel the same as the inspirion 5000 that my wife has so I guess the speedstep thing is really pointless. The machine runs really hot and it is not something you would want to put on your lap per se. The screen is huge for a laptop but the drawback to this particular (the 7500) is that it is very heavy and when closed is about 2" thick. The plus is I have dragged this puppy all over and though it has had quite a beating in the 6 months I have had it is a real workhorse very capable as a desktop replacement.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
(love the .sig)
Anyway, did you do an EMC test on the heaters?
If it's throwing off heat, it's either throwing off light or sub-luminal frequencies?
In fact, just an "on" light would be good enough to destroy their claim!
Phil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Since no one's mentioned it, AMD has a competing technology called "PowerNow!" You can read about it here
It's already available in the K6-2/3+ line and should be available for the Athlon laptops sometime early next year.
Unlike Intel's technology, PowerNow! users a gradient technology (though certainly not quite like Transmeta's level) instead of just fixed speed steppings.
Who else could take something as technologically innovative as underclocking and give it a name like "Speedstep Technology". Just look at the phrase. It screams progress, when in fact it's a step down!
-- Anne Marie
I was wondering...just because it uses less electricity, does that mean it runs cooler as well? because, in the article, i didn't see anything about how cool this chip runs. The one big point with the crusoe is that it runs a LOT cooler than normal chips, so you have have smaller laptops/palmtops that don't need additional fans/heatsinks etc....does this new intel "speedstep" chip run cooler than the others as well?
The anti-salmon