Transmeta Will Help AMD Make Code-Morphing Chips

Mark Imbriaco (and company!) writes: "This story at News.com talks about how AMD is working with Transmeta to ship developers systems using the processor instructions from their upcoming Sledgehammer chip -- apparently Transmeta is working on a version of their code-morphing software that supports this instruction set. In return they seem to be getting a license to make chips using parts of the Sledgehammer design. If it's true, it's a pretty cool step for Transmeta since their other products to date have gotten a mostly lukewarm response over the past couple of months."

Comments

Hmm..

[abelsson]

I can't belive how many people are missing the point of this announcement.

AMD isnt' redesigning Sledgehammer to include Transmeta tech. They're using Cruoses as development simulators to get developers to port their code to the Sledgehammer architecture *before* the silicon hits the shelves. Today, this is NOTHING MORE than a way for AMD to ship fast enough simulators so that ppl can start coding for the Sledgehammer.

In the long term however - it'll allow transmeta to develop Sledgehammer compatible chips - but that's a long way off. (BTW, Is it only me that thinks that they targeted their chips at the mobile market as an afterthought "Oops guys, we can't get this to run fast enough. What to do?" "Hmm.. we'll call it a mobile chip.")

-henrik

Re:Umm..

[TheAncientHacker]

Isn't Transmeta the one who needs help from AMD?

And Transmeta got it. The AMD deal has allowed Transmeta to produce the only things they've been competitively successful at shipping: Press Releases and Slashdot articles.

Memory Access Still a Dilemma

[Christopher B. Brown]

The hard thing about SMP is the issue of memory access. You assortedly have:

• The need to have buses that allow multiple processors to access the same memory;
• The need to have buses to just plain allow access to a bunch of memory to a bunch of processors ;
• The need for synchronization logic so the processors don't step on one another.

The latter "bit" is no small matter, and the potential of having a bunch of CPUs on one chip doesn't make these issues go away.

These issues are essentially why AMD (and Cyrix and others) haven't had SMP systems; it's costly to construct the logic necessary to let multiple CPUs play on the same set of memory buses without trampling on one another, and the tradition of AMD/Cyrix being "low end" was just not compatible with spending the money to build that.

I'm still skeptical that there will be any massive movement by AMD towards SMP. And the introduction of some "cool code morphing" from Transmeta doesn't do anything to simplify or otherwise resolve this.

I would think that there could be some pretty slick results from an AMD/Transmeta technology transfer; it's just that SMP doesn't seem high on the list of "obvious cool things."