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."

Comments

Re:Crusoe for servers?

[johnnyb]

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.

RLX story - fairly accurate

[Ducky]

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 =)

Re:Not what Transmeta's employees are saying

[marxmarv]

Lack of confidence isn't the only reason you sell stock. With the market being such an unstable beast and having bled so much in recent history, maybe employees are getting smart and refusing to believe in the options racket.

-jhp

Crusoe for servers?

[selectspec]

.

"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.

Re:Crusoe for servers?

[rneches]

Well, I don't know if it's exactly in the wrong direction. It might be a step in an odd direction, but I think there's some wisdom to it if you consider how they intend their CPU's to be used. Transmeta doesn't want to build the fastest chip, or the most powerful chip. If they tried that, they would be stupid - Intel would grind them into the dust. Intel has money to burn on maufacturing technology and speed tweaking thier designs. Speed and power are brut force engineering problems, to some extent - if you're willing to spend more money than the other guy, you can build a faster CPU than they can. Intel (and, to a lesser extent, AMD) can amorize their costs over zillions of units, so Transmeta has no hope whatsoever of winning in a contest based mainly on capital expenditures. So, they have to be clever, and go somewhere where they can actually make a better product than Intel for a given purpose.

Since there is no real point in Transmeta going after Intel and AMD (at least not this year), they have instead elected to do something rather clever, and go after a market that Intel and AMD aren't serving very well - the mobile market.

By sacrificing a little performace, Crusoe chips could potentially bring some truely spectacular battary life to portable computers - and with lower power consumption, you can have smaller battaries, which are lighter... et cetera. And for mobile applications, you really don't need a powerful CPU - I've been using my Dell Latitude with a 366 MHz processor as my Linux workstation, and I have yet to encouter a situation when I really needed even that much power. I'd much rather it be smaller and lighter and last longer than be more powerfull. Don't get me wrong - power is good, but there are other parts of the equation that decide what a CPU is good for. Intel and AMD are going after a different part of the curve than Transmeta. That very fact shows that Transmeta has, at the very least, a compotent management team. Their success, should they find any, will show whether or not they are more than just compotent.

--

Try again re: Single Point of Failure

[fanatic]

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.)

--

Zero failure?

[Argy]

"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.

Why 324?

[jefferson]

Why they then call it a System 324 and not a 336 is a conundrum.
...
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.

Low Power Displays

[Jagasian]

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.