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IBM Cancels Crusoe Laptop
sheckard writes: "News.com reports that IBM has suspended a project geared toward releasing a ThinkPad notebook with a Crusoe processor. This could be a very bad thing for Transmeta, since their IPO is rapidly approaching." The Transmeta IPO is supposed to be on the sixth of November - IBM has been doing work on examining it, but have decided to put off plans for it for the time being.
Yes, transistors draw current.
Yes, processing uses transistors.
This doesn't mean that Crusoe is a sorry product- that it sucks.
It all depends on the design. If you've got a really efficient simple CPU that runs really fast, you in theory gain over the CISC CPUs because while you're a little slower by emulating them, you're consuming much less power than they are. If it looks like a 700MHz CPU when I'm running 900-1000MHz, consume only a watt or two while doing that (note: At full tilt, the PIII consumes something on the order of 20 or so...) then it's more efficient- no matter HOW you slice it. Will it make a dent in a laptop? Sort of. You don't eat 20 or so watts in CPU power another couple for the fan/heatsink combo. You end up being able to get away with more batteries if you choose (the heatsink's no longer weighing you down...) or smaller ones (slightly- you're able to kill roughly a fourth of the power consumption by doing things this way.). However, having said this, you've got the HD, floppy, CD, sound card amplifier, and display all eating power as well, with the HD and display being the consumers of the remainder of the lion's share of power use by a laptop. If they get OLEDs out soon, that will cut the power consumption much the same way as Transmeta's attempting to do with the Crusoe.
As for me being scared of knocking them? I'm not. But, in the same breath, I'm also not pathalogically attacking them either. I'm adopting a wait-and-see attitude about the Crusoe line.
Oh, and it's "electricity", not "electronicty".
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
In the notebook market no consumer cares one whit whether the CPU is Intel, AMD, Crusoe or hamsters on a wheel. It's about prices features weight and to some extent, gee-whiz factor. Nobody I mean nobody gives a crap whether it uses .1 watt or 10 watts in idle. And here's a news flash for all of you - - nobody really cares that much about battery life either. For the minority of folks who can't use or carry around a powersupply, car lighter adapter or extra battery, yeah ok extended battery life is a great benefit. But look around how many people actually fall into that category? And how many people are actually going to be concerned with how much time they get on their battery when THEY'RE NOT DOING ANYTHING? That is, how much more battery do you get on a Crusoe when you're actually running some apps? Think about the components that sell notebooks: DVD, big screen, big drive and coolness factor.
Under what scenarios do those factors lead you to use a notebook strictly on battery for extended amounts of time? So in the end Crusoe is a way cool code morphing hunka hunka burnin love but so what.
You have to be able to make a VAIO C1XR sized machine that weighs less than 2lbs and can run 10+hrs on a charge while playing a DVD. And while your at it - since I want to feel comfortable leaving everything but the notebook itself behind you have to build the thing inside of a shell that I can carry around comfortably without a bag, in one hand without worrying about damaging it. Oh and while you're at it, put a cell phone on a PCCARD and let me leave that other device home as well.
Hmmmm.. other than the 10+ hrs battery I think I can do that already with a VAIO or a Libretto.
This is probably why IBM is still thinking about it.
I tend to agree that their laptops are not the fastest things in the world, but the agony I get from carrying around a Compaq brick makes me long for a light machine, not a fast one. SuSE doesn't seem to give much of a damn whether it can surf the net at 300MHz or 700MHz!
Amen to that! I currently use a Sharp Actius A150 (same form factor as the litle Viao's) with 64 MB of Ram and a pentium 266. No built in CDRom or floppy.
Size matters, at least for a laptop, and I would much rather have my existing small form factor then double the performance. Red Hat 7.0 does not care either, and running Gnome, sawfish, a couple of netscape windows, an MP3 player, and 5 or so emacs windows feels just as fast as my sun workstation.
As for battery life, I get an hour from my old mostly fried internal NiMh... which has never been a problem for me. It's just not that hard to find a plug when I need the laptop. Places without plugs lend themselves more to the use of my palm pilot.
This (to meander back on topic) is where the curusoe can really shine... "good enough" performance at a great price and outstanding form factor.
Picture a Sony Viao form factor laptop with a decent 13" diagonal 800x600 LCD, a [Celeron 300 | K6-2 450] level CPU, built in 10/t ethernet, 1 PCMCIA slot, 1 USB port, 64 MB of ram, and a 10 gig hard drive.
Heck, you could even drop the battery and charging stuff (but keep the suspend features) to make it smaller and cheaper... outlets are pretty easy to find.
Now picture it at your local Best Buy for $650. Maybe with a $10 per month for 1 year optional payment plan.
It would be unremarkable in every catagory, but INCREDIBLY usefull. They would fly off the shelves... kind of the VW Beetle (the old one, not the new one) of computers...
Bill
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
The first publicly available transmeta laptop released last week got mediocre <A HREF=http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,3 9486,00.html> benchmarks </A>. In fairness, Transmeta replies that current benchmark programs may be inadequate, because the first pass does morphing.
"Learning" may be great when your going for uptime, but on a laptop, your usually up and running for irratic periods of time. The "Learning" feature of code morphing will only hinder the performance that you need the FIRST TIME you run an application
I hope Crusoe goes with the wind. Its not hardened enough for embedded, not powerfull enough for pc and i personally don't think its "saving much juice". Hell, the biggest advantage in powersaving is your using a screen half the size of a modern laptop.
However, I think that the Transmeta stuff has just gotten out of hand. If this was any other company, they would not get such attention, but simply because it has some affiliation with Linus Torvalds means that people actually care?
Not really. Linux is great, but transmeta... what are they doing for me right now? Not all that much. What will they do for me in the future? Maybe a little, but not all that much again. It's like doing a 30 part series on the little IBM eraser nub pointing device. WE GET IT, WE GET IT, WE GET IT. Low power consumption. We get it. It's worth an article or two, but not 20.
Move along, nothing new to see here, thanks.
Thinkpads are geared towards large corporate purchasers (just try to order an A20p as an individual if you doubt that), so a Crusoe Go/No-Go decision is going to based around the saleability of that product to the suits.
That could mean:
1) Corporate IT wants to stick with the Intel brand name. Good tech don't mean crap if the customers won't plunk down their change.
2) IBM has doubts about the robustness of the chip. Because Thinkpads go into their highest value enterprise accounts, they'll be more picky about compatibility/longevity issues than otherwise. The overall customer relationship here is far more valuable that the profit from a single batch of ThinkPads.
3) Intel or AMD has incented this behaviour by cutting IBM a deal. Remember the bottom line is $$$. IBM is a huge company so the fact that one part is making the chips, or that another portion ponied up vulture capital doesn't mean a thing. Witness IBM PCCo leaving IBM PSP's OS/2 to twist in the wind when the MS OEM agreements came around.
4) Manufacturing bandwidth. They may not have room in their factories to built yet-another ThinkPad variation. Jiminy Crickits... in early June I tried to splurge on a ThinkPad A20p (complete with video capture, 15" LCD and a titanium case) and was given a *LATE OCTOBER* delivery date. Folks, that's 5 months of backlog. I'm sure they'd be filling those orders sooner if they could. (Off-Topic: After a month of waiting I canceled my order and bought a Dell Inspiron 7500 which was on my doorstep in 2 days)
5) Cluelessness. I consider this the least possible... IBM (recently) has been doing an outstanding job of moving technology from the research labs to the customer. The ThinkPad folks have been some of the best at product execution.
-Rob
--Rob
CPU power consumption is probably one of the lowest consuming elements of a laptop: those screens use the most
You're overstating your case here. Other bits of hardware use lots of power, like the hard drive and display, but the CPU is still in the top three. And CPU power usage is significant in laptops, which is why Intel keeps retooling their chips for laptop use.
Somehow this reminds me of WinModems, such a clever idea to drive the modem with software instead of hardware... it will work just as well, right?
Hmmm... doesn't seem to have worked out that way.
I don't think this will matter too too much for Transmeta right now. They've got a chance to prove themselves with Sony right now, and if kick it hardcore on the outset, they should be fine.
IPO isn't where it all comes down to in the long run anyway. Even if the IPO price is affected by the fact that IBM isn't currently planning on releasing a Crusoe Thinkpad, they'll make there money if they make an impact in the market place. Which is, in my opinion, how it should be anyway.
And in the end, this isn't IBM saying that they will never make a Thinkpad with a Crusoe in it, so all you fans of IBM and Transmeta might yet see all your wishes come true -- that is, if Transmeta can deliver on its promises. This next quarter will prove very pivotal for Transmeta, and I really do hope that they put up some stiff competition in the portable processing market. And Crusoe is just a first product, and is (at least in my opinion) just a taste of what Transmeta and the gang have in store. And in the worst case, at least there is more competition to bring down prices in the short run. But I've gone on long enough for one post, and that's a whole other story...
JDW
I had REALLY wanted to buy a Crusoe Thinkpad, as opposed to, say, a Crusoe Vaio..... and we should all know why, Sony is one of the spawn of the devil. (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) Sure, I haven't bought yet, but I was planning to put my money where my mouth is. That'll be a little harder now....
*sigh* Oh well, maybe no new laptop for me for a while now.
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The Crusoe, I am convinced, is a great processor ... because it comes from a tiny little company that is iconified by the hero of the open source movement.
Let's be level headed about this stuff, folks. Transmeta has no special right to anything they don't earn. I wish them the best of luck, but they've got to prove themselves in the marketplace just like everyone else.
The Register also carried the story. They had an interesting point about the benchmarking business. How do you benchmark a piece of hardware that "learns" about its applications and improves performance over time? The initial benchmark will be poor, but as you run the app again and again (as you will with most apps), the performance will improve. Not what your typical benchmark measures. Do we now have to "brun in" a benchmark?
Too bad for both IBM and Intel... they're both being overtaken by companies which seem to care about technology a little more than they do. Probably still care about money more though.
Who exactly are these companies who are "overtaking" IBM and Intel and care about technology?
1) Sun fights IBM at the middle/top end of the market. While I think Sun rocks, I don't think they are any better technology-wise
2) Most people suppose Intel sold their engineering soul to the devil when they went with Rambus. I genuinely think they saw technological merit with Rambus initially, but got caught out when Rambus seemingly became difficult to integrate.
I don't actually have (that) much respect for either IBM or Intel, but I'm not sure any other corporate in this dear green world gives a stuff about technology any more, except when they can make a fast buck from it
I guess they don't care about new technology, but care about the almighty buck and their relationship with Intel.
You can hardly accuse a company that has spend billions developing the PowerPC with Motorola, and spent years manufacturing customer processors for use in RS6000 machines to be scared of Intel.
Much more likely they cannot find any benefits in using Transmeta processors at this point in time, bearing in mind the extremely low margins in low-end kit (i.e. anything under workstation class machines).
I tend to agree that their laptops are not the fastest things in the world, but the agony I get from carrying around a Compaq brick makes me long for a light machine, not a fast one. SuSE doesn't seem to give much of a damn whether it can surf the net at 300MHz or 700MHz!
The Crusoe, I am convinced, is a great processor. Big companies are just incredibly wary of it because it comes from a tiny little company that is iconified by the hero of the open source movement. Given that the higher-ups are less than optomistic about the little guys, regardless how good their products are, this really shouldn't come as much as a surprise.
:-)
Explain: you are convinced it is great why?
1) It relied on vapourware and almost Blair-Witch-esque hype before it was released (remember those "uses Alien Technology" stories kids?!)
2) CPU power consumption is probably one of the lowest consuming elements of a laptop: those screens use the most
3) It has Linus on the payroll! Fantastic: it was already signed off for production when he joined.
Get over it people: it's just another processor. I agree whole-heartedly with it's aims of both code morphing and power saving, but it's nowhere near the revolution we were all promised. And it *was* televised
Have you ever tried to REBUILD a thinkpad? snap the keyboard cable while you are changing out the CDRom? Download six difrent drivers for the integrated modem before finding the right one? Ya, there are worse, but none of them kept me up nights.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Some modles of thinkpad, you had to remove the keyboard to swap out the CDROM/Floppy
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Agreed on the CDROM, but on some modles, you have to remove the keyboard to do so. Rebuilding refers to reloading the software. get a clue.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Actually, no. Heat and power consumption are directly related, lower one and the other is lowered. Think about it: what 'work' is done by the electricity in a microprocessor? From the physics standpoint nothing. It is not converted to light, sound, motion, and the RF is negligible. All of the energy is converted to heat. If you think about it a computer is nothing more than a space heater.
A associate once mentioned the key to miniaturization of consumer devices is heat. The more heat, the larger the chip itself (to transfer heat), the larger the heat sink (to dissipate heat), and the larger the battery (to store the energy to generate the heat). As heat goes down size goes down.
When you have as much free cash as IBM does the best strategy is to do a little seeding with it. If one out of twenty pays off you still win more than enought to cover the 19 losses.
Transmeta refused to release some of its proprietary secret like Code morphing instructions code(last time I checked it's proprietary information)may be the reason.
Last year IBM threaten to cease support to java if SUN refused to lift its control at Java specification. Much has been done this year from Sun on Java on open source movement. Sun yield to the fact that IBM is the biggest employer of Java.
IBM is good at bargaining, I know, I were its employee.
Good time to get more bargaining power before transmeta's IPO. Smart.