The Transmeta Pushme-Pullyou?

tired.cranky writes: "An article on LinuxDevices.com sez that Transmeta is about to ship a quasi-distro slash embedded development toolkit featuring Linus' new super-efficient cramfs and ramfs filesystems. Apparently, a reasonably normal Linux system can be shoehorned into 8MB of storage, with zlib decompression-on-demand and such. It sounds like it could push a fair few hobbyists and embedded developers in Transmeta's general direction, too... and reads nicely next to a Register piece on Transmeta's leaked server initiative. Does one end of Transmeta know where the other is pointed?"

Comments

Saint Nick just doesn't like Dietzel - it's heat!

[WillSeattle]

The low power, many microprocessor solution has been propounded many times, and it has routinely failed in the marketplace. Why?

People don't care about low power on servers. Even if the power costs and cooling costs are trippled, only a handful are in a position where optimizing for power, not speed is important.
Theoretical peak, N cheap processors is much more powerful than one expensive processor

Then why are sales of low-power servers skyrocketing, especially in San Francisco, which someone from Berkeley should know about. Hint: read the local business pages sometime. I do up here in Seattle, and it's reported here.

There are high-demand servers, mid-demand servers, and back-up servers. For high-demand, constant traffic servers your arguments make a lot of sense. For mid-demand or failsafe rollover servers, the heat cost and power cost are a higher fraction of the operating expense of the server, which is likely a cheaper box with dual drives but chock full o RAM.

Servers don't come in one size or one shape. Some people serve up lots of static pages, some people have worldwide operations. Others have frequent low-traffic periods and may have a primary hit box with some image servers that can afford to have a little lag time and would get a high return on code-replication as it serves the same file over and over and over and over and over.

Just because you don't like Dietzel doesn't make you right. Think before you post, do some research, a few base google queries, check the local trade mags, before leaping to assumptions.

It's going to run slash?

[DataSquid]

Transmeta is about to ship a quasi-distro slash embedded development toolkit

And how does one develop under such a system? Post your programs and hope they get modded up to compile-threshold level?