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Compaq Holds Off On Crusoe
scott1853 writes "Accroding to this article on ZDNet, based on this article at G2News, Compaq has decided to put off use of Crusoe in favor of Intel's P3. Unlike IBM, Compaq isn't claiming to put the processor on hold, they appear to have made their final decision not to use it. Could this be Intel flexing it's influential muscles, or is Transmeta not being competitive enough price-wise?"
This decision only confirms the wavering they've been having since at least June. They always wanted to see the goods before they committed themselves to shipping a product, and I guessed they aren't impressed. And unlike IBM, Compaq has never even demoed a transmeta prototype, so the decision is even easier for them to make without losing complete face.
-- Anne Marie
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Why doesn't someone just loop the frickin' benchmarks and draw the graph? It should be flat on AMD/Intel and show an increase for the Crusoe.
This seems awfully unfair to transmeta...to test their cpu against the same standard as the big guns, when their main feature in dynamicism.
Anyone who thinks dynamic code/data analysis is BS...read up on SGI/Nvidias video driver strategies.
It seems painfully obvious that a computing system should optimize itself to the task at hand.
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Intel is about to release new low power chips. If these things are anywhere in the same ballpark as the Crusoe in power use, it isn't worth the change.
With the new Intel chips Compaq doesn't have to reengineer much. Customers already know what a Pentium is. How many know what a Crusoe is? And, there are no chances of an odd incompatibility with the Pentium like there may be for th Crusoe. Just seems to make sense to me.
It does sound kind of similar. In fact, here's what seems to be a common theme:
Nobody wants to be first, but everybody wants to be second.
I haven't been watching this as closely (I'm happy with my PowerBook G3), but it did seem to go a bit like this: for a long time everybody was interested but nobody was actually announcing anything; then somebody announced a product, and everybody else rushed to follow suit; now everybody is backing off. I guess the optimistic view would be to suppose that everybody wants to do it but they are nervous about the risk of being the first to test the waters, and that once somebody finally does it, the rest will again follow.
David Gould
David Gould
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The Transmeta chip should not be targeted towards conventional laptops, but instead should be used to improve the performance of PDA's. Imagine a Windows CE or Palm device with as much processing power as an Intel PII-300.
I really don't want to see Transmeta die, it has a novel concept. It would really shine if they developed a native Java-VM for it that would translate the byte code just as it does 80x86 instructions.
BTW for all the anti-Intel people out there, don't forget unlike M$ they do a real competitor or two (AMD, for a while Cyrix, for a while IBM, TI on occasion, and now possibly Transmeta). Also don't forget when a problem is discovered in their product they have to fix it (unlike the 65,000 problems another company hasn't fixed). The actual product that reaches 99% of the public is a good and reliable. Yes its sad that now their marketing department runs the company, and that they haven't modified the core integer pipeline in 5 years, but the engineers working for them are good.
Compaq sells Athlons by the truckload in their desktops. Just go to any Best Buy and look.
With IBM and Compaq both now not doing Crusoe notebooks, I think there is some problem that we don't know. Either price, or a real performance issue. Maybe the final power savings in a full size notebook just aren't worth the effort required to make a new model like this.
Once again, the artificial benchmarking system seems to doom yet another competitor. Due to the need to translate the x86 intruction set to their own instruction set (VLIW), TransMeta's Crusoe seems to be not the choice for Compaq.
Obviously, there is going to be some slowdown when testing the entire instruction set (or a reasonable subset thereof), but Crusoe should beat out the P3 on repetitive tasks.
Just my opinion here, we need new benchmarking standards.
Eric Gearman
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Could it be that well established companies don't want to take a risk and use a new product from a company nobody knows anything about? Could it be that without Linus Torvalds, nobody would even bother to look at Transmeta? Could it be that the power savings from the CPU are hardly noticable in the large scheme of things when you have LCD backlights and hard drives to power?
The Crusoe chips in their current incarnations are simply x86 wannabees. They emphasise power thriftiness over performance. Therefore if Intel and AMD come out with equally power efficient chips, their advantage would be gone. Besides, as has been pointed out numerous times, the CPU is only one part in the power budget of a portable, and not even the largest one.
.NET architecture. Or develop a hybrid chip that can switch between x86 and PPC instruction sets dynamically, allowing you to run Windows and MacOS for example on the same machine at the same time. There are lots of issues that would make the latter pretty hard beside the CPU, but my point is to take advantage of your strengths to do something your competitors can't.
Transmeta should instead apply the code morphing technology in fields without ready competitors. Maybe something like a Java chip, or something fitting into Microsoft's
The problem with today's benchmarks are that they don't simulate real honest-to-goodness usage patterns.
;)
Before the Crusoe, they came close enough. Running the same program on a processor multiple times yielded the same results, so long as the program wasn't competing for resources. Those processors were in a limited way "stateless," which is to say that they don't remember anything from the last time the program ran.
Since benchmarkers didn't need to worry to much about it, the benchmarks generally run a program once, then run a different one, then a different one, etc., etc., etc..
In real life, however, a person is likely to open Word, then maybe open Internet Explorer, close Word, open Excel(which shares a lot of code with Word), close Excel, open Internet Explorer, and so on. That is *real life* usage, and Crusoe performs fairly well at it - certainly not as bad as traditional benchmarks would suggest.
When was the last time you played Quake III for two minutes? Yeah, I thought so. Fact is, when you're running on a Crusoe, those first two minutes will be much slower than the subsequent hour
So, as you can understand, Crusoe doesn't need "rigged" benchmarks - it just needs *real* benchmarks. The problem isn't that Crusoe will only perform well if the benchmarks are rigged, the problem is that Crusoe *won't* perform well unless the benchmarks put a computer under the same stresses and loads(or lack thereof) that a computer will go through on a daily basis.
Dave
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It doesn't matter how advanced the technology is, how cool it sounds, nor who helped design it. If there isn't a market need for the product, it's going to be hard to find people to integrate it. Crusoe offers somewhat higher battery performance at the cost of performance. Does the market want lower performance? I think you'll find that pricing is based on processor performance and features like built in ethernet, firewire, etc. right now, and battery life is something laptop users have come to accept as being less than 4 hours. If people are going to buy a laptop with lower performance, they expect lower cost. If Transmeta wants to fit in to the market, they need to adjust their pricing and help integrators market battery life better. And saying a 600MHz processor has performance like a PIII at 500MHZ when it is really more comparable to a 350MHz PIII doesn't help your marketting campaign one bit. It isn't like the users aren't going to verify that.
Just like Linux is having/has had a hard time overcoming the Windows mind-share, so will Transmeta have a similar fate with regard to Intel/AMD.
You can't really expect such a big splash right away with relatively unproven technology (market wise). Just be glad someone (Sony) has given Transmeta/Crusoe a chance and let the performance of their product dictate their success. Look how long AMD took to really get a foothold in the CPU market. After all their K6's, it wasn't really until the Thunderbird Athlon that they earned their place in the market with a fantastic product.
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Umm so on the basis that it is slower on the overall benchmarks and that these benchmarks aren't designed to make Transmeta win... you want new benchmarks. The benchmarks referenced are application benchmarks, and what better test of a CPU than how quickly it runs an application.
Sounds so like MS "we're quicker if you let us rig the test" comparisons with Linux.
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