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

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 =)

Crusoe for servers?

[selectspec]

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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.