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

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. :-)

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.