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Transmeta Goes Embedded

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everyone-will-have-web-pads-in-a-year dept.

quinticent writes: "An article at CNet talks about Transmeta's entrance into the embedded market. CEO Mark Allen is quoted as saying, "By this time next year, it could equal the notebook market." Wow, when can I get my hands on a cheap embedded Transmeta system to play around with?"

5 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. embedded is SWEET by TechnoVooDooDaddy · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been playing around creating embedded ethernet devices... temperature sensors, stuff to control my homebrew beer rig..

    check out the TINI stuff at
    Dallas Semiconductor

    $50-60 will get you a board you can play around with and put on you home ethernet lan..

  2. They have no choice, Intel has awakened. by Shivetya · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Eventually if you poke enough times Chipzilla will wake, and thats exactly what has happened. Both AMD and Transmeta have to look at other markets to sustain their profits. AMD has flash memory, and Transmeta is now realizing it needs to enter a market other than the laptop market. I would not be surprised to see Transmeta leave the notebook market completely within a few years.

    Simply put, their advantage over Intel in the notebook market is nearly gone, Intel simply did what they constantly do, get off their butts and release the products they should have already had out there, and at prices where they should have been.

    If anything, Transmeta's best contribution to the notebook market was in forcing Intel to release superior products are reasonable prices.

    --
    * Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
  3. Re:Transmeta Smarsmeta... by tmark · · Score: 5, Funny

    Would Transmeta get all this hoopla if Linus didn't work there?

    I am pretty certain they wouldn't get as much hoopla here if Linus didn't work there. Linus could run a company selling gas chambers to neo-Nazi groups and the crowd here would be talking up how the code determining gas mixtures was open-source.

  4. Isn't this what Transmeta is FOR? by serps · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When you look at the specs of (or the hype, if you hold that opinion) the crusoe chips, it boggles the mind why they didn't push this this sooner. 'Runs on one AA battery', goes the sales pitch - perfect for the embedded systems which need a half-decent chip but need to conserve battery life (i.e. practically all of them)

    A friend of mine was so hoping to use a Crusoe in his embedded web browser tablet thesis project back in 2000. Pity it was released too late for him :)

    --
    "Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
  5. Re:Y'all still using by gorilla · · Score: 5, Informative
    The Z80A was actually the chip that the Sinclair systems had, a higher rated version of the Z80. It was actually rated for 4Mhz, but Sinclair underclocked it to either 3.25Mhz (ZX80 and ZX81) or 3.5Mhz (Spectrum) because it saved on a seperate clock chrystal. The original Z80 was a 2.5Mhz chip. Later Z80 variants were the Z80B (6Mhz) and Z80H (8Mhz), and the Hitachi HD64180 added a MMU to support paged memory.

    The Zilog Z280 was a 16 bit CPU, also adding a MMU, but mainly increasing the address space to 16Mb, with an internal clock quad, so it would run at 16Mhz on a 4Mhz bus.

    Later still, there was the Z8000, which was also basically 16 bit, but had instructions to use its registers as 8,16,32, or 64 bit registers, and the Z80000, which was 32 bits internal version, but with the same basic instruction set.

    Zilog's current product line include a number of variations on the above chips, designed for embedded systems with things like on chip ethernet, UARTS, real time clock, etc.