Crusoe and Benchmarks

duffbeer703 wrote to us with a ZD story regarding Transmeta's Crusoe speed and benchmarking. As we've heard the benchmarks haven't overwhemled people - but are we measuring things the wrong way? Of course emulation is slower then native chipsets - that's a given - but are the other elements of Crusoe enough to make up for it?

Comments

Eh, yes and no

[Anne Marie]

We're still not measuring the correct quantities: consumer value and whether the damn thing will have to be recalled within the first week of hitting the market because of some stupid FOOF error like Intel's have been known to do.

You make a correct point, but you don't take it far enough: what's important is not whether Crusoe is clock-for-clock equivalent to Intel's and AMD's offerings. The question is whether a device can be put together using Crusoe at a reasonable price that taken as a whole, fulfills consumers' needs.

The issue is not so much that Crusoe cannot compete in markets currently dominated by Intel and AMD. The question is whether Intel and AMD are the appropriate choices for those markets to begin with. For most consumer devices, they're overkill, both in computing power and electrical power dissapated. Crusoe has a bright future in these markets, and if it were publicly traded, I'd consider picking up a couple shares.

No, emulation doesn't have to be slower.

[Nurf]

Something I see over and over again is that emulation has to be slower than the original, yadda yadda blah blah.

This is not true.

There are a lot of advantages to being able to modify the code at run time. Most of them involve the optimiser being able to check its initial guess about how to optimise the relevant code. Think of it as a sort of runtime profiling followed by regeneration of code segments.

One example is HP's Dynamo, a PA-RISC CPU emulator that runs code faster on a PA-RISC than the same code running natively. Try:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/dynamo/dynam o-1.html for more information.

Another example would be Dr Michael Franz's work on Dynamic Optimisation. Try: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/DynamicOpt.html for more information.

Right. Now stop making assumptions. :-)

Ummm...

[technomancerX]

Of course it's slower...

But what REALLY isn't being taken into account is that the benchmark suites run everything ONCE... but the Transmeta chip gets faster with subsequent runs...

Check this article on Wired for more info.

According to something else I read (sorry no link on this one) performance improves an average of 30% on subsequent runs... so take the benchmarks with a grain of salt.

.technomancer

Re:Ummm...

[Paladin128]

Have you ever written code at a low level? Most programs often do a small set of operations multiple times in succession, and perform complex tasks. How often does Word draw a character on the screen? How often does Excel add two numbers?

Most of my coding experience involves taking large amounts of stuff to do, breaking them into smaller, re-usable parts, and using those parts in various order to perform complex tasks.

"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"

Re:Multiple Run

[Steve S]

My company is working with some Transmeta products. And I can tell you from our own benchmarks that there is a huge improvement between first run and third run. Even discounting cache.

Laptops require sacrifices ...

[Lupulack]

After all, you don't expect your laptop to have a 19" screen? Four speaker Dolby (tm) surround sound? In a laptop, you want it to be light, easy to carry, fast *enough* and to have *enough* battery life for your needs.

As has been said in previous articles, many people would be THRILLED with a Pentium 200 based laptop, if only it would have a reasonable battery life. The Crusoe chips appear to give FAR better performance than that, with lower power usage ( gotta love intigrated memory controllers! ).

Who REALLY needs a P-III Coppermine 800 in their laptop? And if you do, don't bitch about battery life, you're getting other benefits.