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Fiva: Transmeta Sub-Sub-Notebook
An anonymous reader writes "The Tech Report has an article on Crusoe-powered devices. Plenty of pictures, with details on offerings from Casio, NEC and Sony, among others. These things are really tiny and the batteries last forever! I want one." The fiva is especially sharp. Extremely small: could be very useful.
I looked at this thing on the weekend, it looks ok if a little flimsy. The screen is pretty small and the gateway guy that I was talking to was unable to answer any of my techical questions. The UI was pretty and obviously there was no sign that the underlying O/S is Linux. Why can't the hardware vendors make what we are all looking for, which is a slick, cheap Linux based device that can run your standard internet applications locally and is extenisible through both Java and as an X terminal on your home network!
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
How useful are these things? Tiny keyboards, very very small screen sizes, Windows ME.
:-)
Here's my experience: Very, very useful.
I used to own a Toshiba Libretto 70ct and now have a Fujitsu Lifebook 112, both are very tiny laptops. The first was 850 gramms with about 90 minutes battery time, the second is around 1200 gramms with usually more than 3, sometimes 4 hours battery time, which is a lot if you look at the battery's size.
They both are "regular" PC-style laptops and I have Windows and Linux installed on them. Both offer substandard performance compared to "normal" laptops.
However, portability is more important to me than raw performance. The Lifebook is a Pentium 233 and it is enough for me to write Perl, PHP and Java stuff while on the road.
I don't have a car and don't have to, as I have a bike and there is an excellent public transportation system in my city and affordable trains in my country.
Without a car, I found myself *carrying* my laptop with me practically all the time. And believe me, 3 kilogramms (or usually more these days) is a *lot* once you carry it all day long.
And it's not just the weight, the size of these devices is also a problem. A regular laptop requires a special, rather big protective case. My Libretto literally did not need much more space than a big pocket calculator, my Lifebook still fits in a very small bag (originally made for photo gear) that I can wear easily while riding my bike.
I now smile at my colleagues who sigh about their heavy laptops, while I can easily afford having a 160 MB Ram, 12 Gigabyte laptop with me all the time, running my most important applications at decent speed. And yet it's so small that people ask me all the time how I like Windows CE.
A device like that, even more lighter and with longer battery time, I couldn't ask for more.
The size of the keyboard is a problem, though. I touchtype, but that was impossible on the Libretto and the Lifebook is just the minimal size keyboard one can touchtype on, at least for my fingers.
It's similar to a PDA, though. Once I arrive at my destination, I usually have a normal keyboard and a large screen waiting for me, anyway, so that the laptop's input devices is mostly used on the road.
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Now that is one sweet looking laptop. That wide screen makes a whole lot more sense than a 4:3 size screen. That is one machine that might wean me from my 2 lb. Mitsubishi Amity.
For those who say that no one wants a small keyboard, phhhhhhht! Since I carry my laptop every day, I want low weight and long battery life over full size and desktop speed. There certainly is a niche market for these things.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Now, (3.5 years later), I have a 3.5 lb laptop, with a 166mhz pentium chip and 240 megabytes of ram. it's about an inch thick, and it cost me $800 used. I love this thing! I use it for word processing, e-mail, ssh, and the occasional web browsing. It's the same size as a pad of paper. I'm not writing a novel with it -- it's not my work computer. I just use it for basic functionality.
The transmeta laptops fill this need for me PERFECTLY. They're small, their battery life is (conservatively) double the length of my current laptop's, and they're at least twice as fast. I might get to put some games on this thing. But, if I don't, and I only word process, that will be fine. Why? I just use it for basic functionality. On a plane, when I'm carrying it on my back, the damn thing better be light. And, if it's got wireless networking, that doubles the effectiveness. But, if it doesn't have DVD, or even a CD-ROM, does that matter? No, because I just use it for basic functionality. My 2cents.
Are the Tranmeta style chips going to show up in portable devices, such as Palm Pilots? Why or Why not?
John S. Rhodes
Industrial Strength Usability -- WebWord.com
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take a look at the vaio GT1 - 600mhz crusoe built into a DV camera - 2.42 lbs, 17 hours battery, 6.4" 1024x768 display.
no I dont work the people selling it, and its probably completely impractical, but its got my geek factor going (and it would be a perfect base for a wearable). If only it didnt cost 4000 dollars :(
http://www.dynamism.com/gt1/index.shtml
--
Lauren Child, lauren@laurenchild.net
> We'll meet at Three O'clock." Then they all whip out thier PDAs and say. .PM!....Save!" in turn.
> "New!...Apointment!...Friday!...Three!...Oclock!.
Or even better, imagine a room of students working on projects, muttering into microphones. Then, from nowhere, a naked pledge runs across the room shouting "Shutdown! Quit without Save! Shutdown!"
My fingers are not the fattest I've ever seen (I knew a chap once who had difficulty on a full size keyboard[*]), but the getting a full qwerty keyboard in an area the size of my hand doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Few input devices are as fast or familiar as a full sized keyboard, but when you get below a certain size, other methods must be considered. Graffiti is cool, but I have difficulty forming the characters with consistency (it requires more loopiness than my normal handwriting), and after a while my hand starts to ache. Voice input has potential, and it looks like these devices have the horsepower to do it. I haven't played with chording keyboards, but people who use them tend to rave about them.
[*] he had difficulty with other things, too, like breathing, and walking up the two flights of stairs to our (elevatorless) offices.
This is what the Crusoe was designed for. From Transmeta's webpage, speaking about the Crusoe TM3200, which ranges from 333-400 mhz with 96K of L1 cache:
- "The TM3200 is the ideal engine for a new class of mobile Internet devices weighing just a pound or two. With up to 400 MHz in performance, the TM3200 is designed to allow a full day of web browsing on a single battery charge."
The current crop of Crusoe processors comes in a 474-pin grid array. This is pretty big if you think about it. This is basically a socket A processor. And when you think of how little room you have in a device such as a Palm Pilot, the comparitavely huge size of the Crusoe processor(s) might present a space problem.Current PDAs are equipped with (usually) Intel's SA-110 (StrongARM) line of processors, the fastest of which runs at only 233mhz. Offhand, I really don't know how big StrongARM processors are physically, but I recall them usually being soldered onto the board and being pretty small, like the size of an old 80487 math co-processor or smaller. In sharp contrast, Crusoes are available from 333mhz-700mhz. Crusoe would definitely provide an infusion of power into the PDA market. PDAs with 400, 500, even 700 mhz processors in them combined with 256MB+ memory have have the potential to be really powerful, but also really expensive.
But I guess we all know that already. Unfortunately, I cannot justify spending $500 on something I probably would never use.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
I suspect that the true power of Transmeta is yet to be unleashed!
We've all seen the reviews of the P4's lackluster performance, until apps are recompiled... well, Transmeta CPUs, in theory, doesn't suffer from that problem!
What would be really powerful from Transmeta is a whole line of different CPUs targeting different markets, but able to run, relatively efficiently, an identical codebase! It's just another level of abstraction, one below ASM this time.
Imagine 4 lines of Transmeta CPUs;
a DSP like CPU handles streaming really well, targeting games or entertainment
an ultra low power ultra efficient device for sub-portables and handhelds
A power-hungry long pipeline high Hz CPU targeting the Intel mainstream
A middling class CPU that is more efficient than the Power Hungry beast, but more powerful than the ultra-low power, for mainstream CPU use
Then imagine the code that, compiled once, would run on all 4 classes of machines! Then code could be written and compiled against, say Java to be silly, and then retranslated and recompiled per architecture to best take advantage of each system. The true, real benefit, however, is the time shifting code independence. Something compiled 3 CPU generations ago will be able to run efficiently and effectively on a modern CPU, because of code morphing, where both Intel and Apple has had issues whenever the userbase needed to be moved over from one architecture to another.
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