Slashdot Mirror
A Peep From Transmeta And Toshiba (And RLX)
irix writes: "C|Net is reporting that Toshiba will ship a mini-notebook May 18th in Japan, coming to the U.S. later this year. The article also has some information about upcoming Transmeta CPUs." Hints and promises from Transmeta are that the next generation Crusoe will be smaller (half the size of current ones), faster (up to 800MHz) and consume less power (not quantified). U.S. notebook makers still seem reluctant to use them though -- so if Americans want a Crusoe in anything but a Sony Picturebook before the end of the year, we may have to watch dynamism.com and similar places. Update: 05/07 09:37 PM by T : OS24Ever also writes: "Linuxgram has an article about scooping RLX Technologies announcment of their new System 324 Web Server. At its optimum, the product will hold 336 Web servers running Linux or Windows (Windows costs $200 more). The Transmeta chip runs 80% cooler with 80% less power requirements, eliminating a lot of heat and need for fans, bringing single point of failure in the machine down to near zero."
The interesting thing is that this is exactly what Intel does, too. The only difference is that Crusoe's translations are softcoded, while Intel's are more-or-less hardcoded. Intel chips are actually RISC at the core, with a translation layer between IA32 and whatever they've got underneath. However, I'm willing to bet Intel's RISC machine is optimized directly for IA32 while Crusoe's is probably more general.
Also, it's interesting to note that having the RISC core give the Intel chip a boost, not a setback.
Engineering and the Ultimate
I'm as cynical as the next Slashdot'er. However, before you get yourself up in a craze of "less power, why would I want it?" You need to look at this box. It's COOL.
The possibilities of 24 servers in 3U using the power of a typical 1-2U server are incredible.
Get past the idea of using one server per function. You can setup a balanced solution between multiple servers (say 2,4,8,...24!!!) for such redundancy.
Get past the idea of need a super fast processor. For most web serving functions you're much better served by putting lots of smaller servers out there than you are by putting one big server.
Imagine wiring up 48 ports of ethernet with FOUR cables (plus another 24 ethernets coming out of a single RJ45.)
Stop thinking...they're new...I'm too cool for this. It will change they way you approach web architectures...hell other systems infrastructures too.
In the interests of full disclosure, I am an RLX employee. Mid to late 2000, a friend called me to come look at this box. I quit my job and moved to Texas from DC. Don't particularly like much about the area, having lived in an urban location like Georgetown, and moving to a suburban area like the Woodlands, but that didn't matter. I came running.
So, like I said...look at the product. And think.
No I'm not a marketing guy...
I'm in IT--and you think that you're cynical.
We've got a beta of the RLX Razor at my work. For a managed services company, this thing is sweet!
For that first slot "control tower" one can do all sorts of nifty things with the other blades from power cycling to bios settings... which inclines me to want to have that first blade not be generally accessable to the outside world. This reduces your available work horses to 23 per 3U density. That's still a rackspace bargain, though!
The hard drives may be a point of contention for some people, but the way I envision these is to boot them via net and have your web cluster get data from network attached storage rather than local. This way you may boot these diskless and reduce the power consumption by about half! A fully populated chassis will then suck less than 200 watts.
All in all, a very tasty product. Can't wait to throw these in our colos =)
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
If you read the article *cough*, you would see that it's can be up to 336 servers (processors) in a 42U rack. Very redundant. Surely you'd agree that such a setup would eliminate problems with any single processor failing.
"If I am such a genius, how come that I am drunk and lost in the desert with a bullet in my ass?" --Otto (Malcom ITM)
And some of it could be attributed to investors diversifying their portfolios as they haven't been allowed to do for 6 months. It is a good investment idea.
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The stock lost 23% today as insiders were released from their 1 year lockup-IPO deal and sold. This story suggests that Transmeta is not viewed with great enthusiasm by the people on the inside. Of course some of this selling could be attributed to pressures from other losses to raise capital, but you cant read it as good news regardless.
Someone you trust is one of us.
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"The flexibility of the software-translation approach comes at a price: the processor has to dedicate some of its cycles to running the Code Morphing software, cycles that a conventional x86 processor could use to execute application code."--Transmeta Crusoe Whitepaper
VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) technology employeed by the Crusoe is essentially a software emulation layer for the majority of the CPU instruction set. This means that the "Code Morphing" software that translates instruction sets into VLIW words sucks CPU time. In other words, just because is a 633Mhz CPU, doesnt mean it will perform like a PIII 633Mhz CPU. This sounds like a step in the wrong direction.
Someone you trust is one of us.
he Transmeta chip runs 80% cooler with 80% less power requirements, eliminating a lot of heat and need for fans, bringing single point of failure in the machine down to near zero."
Almost wholly falacious (fellatious?) reasoning. You may think the processor is less likely to fail if it runs cooler, but if there's only one of them, it is still a single point of failure. A single point of failure either is or isn't. It is not "nearly" anything. (If you entirely do away with the need for a fan, it helps some.)
--
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
"The Transmeta chip runs 80% cooler with 80% less power requirements, eliminating a lot of heat and need for fans, bringing single point of failure in the machine down to near zero."
What kind of pointy-haired boss nonsense is that? By what yardstick of single points of failure has it approached zero, and how close is "near?" What about unplugging it? Bumping the reset switch? Drive failure? Flood? Fire? Or running Windows with IIS?
Okay, it's hard to classify Windows as a mere single point of failure.
...
The way RLX has managed to tuck 24 servers into a 3U enclosure is to stick them in vertically.
Not that much of a conundrum. A 3U enclosure containing 24 servers.
J.
The article states that the Toshiba will use a polysilicon display, which, according to this article, is one of the new low-power display technologies that is competing against the new organic displays.
As long as this new laptop does not include CD, floppy, or DVD drives, it should be very power efficient. I wonder what the power bottle kneck for such a laptop is. Does the 10GB harddrive zap too much juice? Or is it the graphics chipset? I bet the speakers are the most energy hungry parts on laptops such as this new Toshiba and the newer Sony Powerbooks.
I have mixed feeling on this one.
But I do not know how viable it will be as a laptop replacement.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
When it arrives on the continent, the notebook will join Sony's Crusoe-powered Vaio, NEC's Versa Ultralight and a new entrant from Casio.
When it arrives on the continent no one will notice! My laptop screams look at me! I come in five different colors of florescent!
Murphy's Law of Copiers
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
I can't wait to see what happens when someone teams up mini-fuel-cell type batteries (like the ones Motorola has in development) with a low-power proc like the Crusoe or StrongARM to build a tablet PC that lasts for a month on a single charge
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.