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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.
> 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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