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Transmeta To Release Next Generation CPU
CodeShark writes: "According to this story at CNN, Transmeta is set to release their new TM6000 microprocessor this afternoon. The chip apparently incorporates some of the functions usually provided by high-performance (and high price!) chip sets. Transmeta is reporting a further reduction in power requirements by 44% and sees the laptop and sub-laptop markert as the primary markets for their new CPU. Intel and AMD claim to be catching up with the Transmeta chips in terms of power requirements, I'd be curious to find out what the real world comparisons might make of those claims ..." If anyone out there is at Microprocessor Forum, please say in comments any further details that are made clear there.
AMD or Transmeta
(Oh. Shit. intel too.)
Anyone else feel this way?
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
They're announcing it, not releasing it. Production won't begin until the second half of 2002.
Here's the press release from transmeta.
Enjoy.
If they did have a patent on coupling software with hardware to emulate registers on a CPU then I would think it will be very difficult for Intel and AMD to follow suit and come up with a equaly power and heat conservitive solution with just plane hardware, unless a new technology in solid state and integrated electronics had been discovered.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Sheesh!
Take a look at their stock price graph in the article. I shoulda sold short on Transmeta last year.
Sounds like a good chip. Hope they aren't going under any time soon.
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
I'd be interested to see how they are going to do against Intel and AMD. Hopefully they will bring new ideas like AMD brought when it got into CPUs again.. anyway, Intel will probably find some way to buy this Co. up.
I'm curious about what information AMD and Intel have to back up their claims that they're catching up to Transmeta in power requirements.
I just got a toshiba laptop earlier this year with a 700mhz celeron. I love it but I rarely use it without being plugged into the wall, as from my experience it only lasts about 2-3 hours.
I remember seeing stuff saying a laptop with a transmeta chip can have a battery life of about 8 hours.
Assuming that is true, how could Intel and AMD possibly say they are catching up? I mean mine is a celeron, not even a pentium III or anything and it sucks up power like I would have never imagined. I hope Intel isn't talking about their powerstep technology, that is just a freaking joke.
Anyone with more information on power consumption among the different chips, I would think Transmeta would have tons of information about this since it's really their main selling point isn't it? I better go check their site.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
Ditzel said Transmeta will prove, despite Intel's claims to the contrary, that the TM5800 beats Intel's lowest power chip by a factor of 2 to 1. "And when we go to our highly integrated chip, we're going to take off another 44 percent," he said. "So we think we've got a substantial lead today, and we're going to keep that."
And yet when we look at these laptops with their lower power processors, there is VERY little added battery life, for the simple reason that the processor is not the major consumer of power in a notebook.
When you factor in that the processors are much slower than the equivalent Intel or AMD (by how much varies by who you ask and what you're doing), and there doesn't seem to be any price break, why would anyone want to use a Transmeta processor?
Transmeta needs to stop trying to sell me that they are "more l33t than Intel" and show me products that are SIGNIFICANTLY better. If they can give me, say, twice the battery life it might be worth switching to an off-brand processor that is much slower.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I agree with this post.
Michael Loves Me!
I thought the key selling point for transmeta was the way it could optimize the CPU for certain tasks. The programs you run get faster after you use it a couple times.
Is all that Transmeta just about power consumption now?
How soon before they start using exponents to write microprocessor numbers? I mean, there are not very many short, round numbers. They can't skip integers they don't like and expect that it will never backfire on them. Get a clue.
The amount of power that these things use is negligble to the amount of power necessary to run any sort of display device. Add to that the code-morphing performance penalty and you end up with a slow chip that doesn't fill a need.
When will Transmeta start coming up with really revolutionary designs?
As is often the case, the Register has some really interesting comments on this story here. Apparently this release has a lot of market control and damage control related to it. There is a class action suit going due to previous claims of high speed chips. Anyways, read the Register article for more details.
does "TM6000" mean it's going to perform equivalent to a 6000mhz P4? ;-)
I wonder if the folks at AMD are worried that this processor is the "equivalent" of a 6GHz P4!!!!
By using less power, one would imagine less heat would be generated as well. But depending on the materials and processes used, will these Transmeta chips follow the same 'faster, hotter, more expensive' trend that AMD is following?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Transmeta refuses to release any industry standard benchmark results for their CPUs.
Ask them. If you get something other than FUD back, please post it.
Why won't they run the SPEC int and FP tests??
They try and hide behind low power claims and can spin FUD with the best of'em. Low power means absolutely nothing unless you know how much WORK it can do.
They will give you benchmark results only if you sign an NDA and promise not to tell anyone how slow their chips are. Most companies who sign the NDA decide not to use their product. What does that say?
I'd really like to see these guys compete with Intel/Rambust, but I have no respect for companies built on FUD, regardless of who is involved.
... how do I build a fanless, 0dBA X server with this thing.
The instructions should be for a software engineer whose most glorious hardware accomplishment was a blinking light in junior highschool.
Marko
It's also worth noting that your Celeron doesn't have the benefit of Intel's speedstep technology, and wastes power running at 700 MHz all the time. Secondly it's not part of the lower voltage line of P III M chips. Just one of those things.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The G4/G3 processors are suposed to be more conservative in terms of power and all else should be standard laptop hardware. How do these compare to the Crusoe?
Data? Opinions? Anyone?
Pedro Côrte-Real.
How could you possibly consider that "the right thing"?!? You verbaly assaulted a woman on the basis of the actions that a few people (who happened to be members of her religon) carried out. Religion is a tool of terrorism, it's not the other way around! Your actions (and dissapointingly the actions of the other patrons) show nothing but uneducated bigotry. What evidence did you have that she, in any way, approved of the attack! Do you approve of the actions of the KKK? Did you consider that she may of had a relative who worked in the WTC and was killed on Sept.11. And yet you congradulate yourself on you actions and affirm that you are a true American!
I stole this Sig
Uh... you forgot PPC in there.
Macintosh G3/366, August 1998.
~ 7 Million transistors.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I have a 2001 iBook. Apple claims 5 hours of battery life; I've never gotten more than 4:10, and usually closer to 3:40. I do like the machine, but ... 5 hours would be a lot nicer, and considering the marketing, also a lot more honest. I'm going to be buying a 2nd battery, but don't kid yourself -- the 2nd battery will make it more acceptable, not as outstanding as the brochure says. Caveat emptor, etc etc. (Yes, set to maximum battery savings, too.) The airport card doesn't seem to change the battery life either direction, either; I was afraid that it would make it noticeably worse, but hasn't, and having it built in is nice enough to be worth a (moderate) battery life cut anyhow.
Besides not getting 5 hours (ever), the battery meter (at least under OS 9.1) is pretty jumpy, changing times pretty strangely, sometimes up, sometimes down.
When Mandrake 8.1 is ready for PPC, I would like to see what sort of battery life it gets.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Wow, a new chip from transmeta. Let me know when someone outside of niche asian markets can sell me a useful device running a first generation chip.
Why is it that every time some new "revolutionary" processor design is announced, it's always about "blowing away Intel and AMD" by some unbelievable factor, but without fail the actual product release always seems to target the "laptop and low-power" market. Funny that.
I think companies should foccus more on lower power displays, hard drives, and especially those evil (when it comes to power usage) cd/dvd drives (although using those alot on the road is generally not a good idea)
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
When I saw it a while ago on the website I remember thinking that it must be a cool place to work because they didn't seem to have many camera-friendly marketing types, 8^)
The only reason to use x86 is because you want to use Windows (non-CE, if you want to use that ARM is of course the only way to go).
Transmeta chips are only low on power consumption compared to other chips running x86 code, compared to other chips performing the same tasks they are definetely not.
The only truly viable markets for their code morphing are (sub-)notebooks running Windows, ironic with the Linus connection, and as a transition path for anyone who would want to make a dent in the desktop/server market (you could introduce a new architecture and still get very passable performance on x86, a lot better than Merced etc in any case).
From $1.19 to $2.25.
Part of the deal with the Crusoe-chips is that they do "code-morphing" and morphs x86 instructions into something the crusoe can handle.
What if the crusoe chip could do the same to PowerPC-code?
Imagine dual-booting MacOSX with Linux x86 and Windows.
Now, that would be interesting, (and probably not something Apple would like).
that means if you turn the brightness all the way down and don't do anything you will get 5 hours of battery life
the ibook 99 claimed to have 6 hours
i usually get around 4
One concern that goes through my mind when I look at the not very stunning performance of Crusoe is the effectiveness of VLIW (very long instruction word) processors.
Both Transmeta and Intel have bet that VLIW processors are the way forward. Intel's Itanium and Transmeta's Crusoe are both based around the VLIW concept. Transmeta hides the VLIW nature of Crusoe behind the 'Code Morphing' software that allows the chip to be IA32-compatible - Intel's IA64 architecture gives compilers raw access to the VLIW nature of the processor, and has (very slow) on-chip emulation of IA32.
Between them, they make up the only commercial VLIW processors around, and both are very poor in terms of performance compared to more conventional modern processors, whilst at the same time introducing some enormous obstacles to overcome - IA64 requires some very major changes to the way compilers work, and Crusoe requires major extra complexity in the form of the Code Morphing translation layer.
I don't wish to jump the gun, but I think this means things don't look too bright for the VLIW concept. Evolutionary enhancements to conventional RISC/CISC processors appear able to continue Moore's Law for many years yet. AMD has outright rejected VLIW for its future 64-bit strategy (x86-64) and none of the other major CPU manufacturers seem to be jumping on board either.
Have Transmeta and Intel made a very large strategic mistake? VLIW looks good on paper, but is it effective on a practical level?
It will certainly be interesting to see what happens with future Crusoe and IA64 processors.
As mentioned on MacCentral IBM just released some PowerPC G3 bundling all their recent breakthroughs and going up to 1 GHz.
"SOI and SiLK taken together with IBM's smallest 0.13-micron copper manufacturing process has resulted in a processor that typically dissipates 3.6W of power at 800MHz [...]"
What I want to see is a laptop with no hard drive, just one of those solid state RAM drives mentioned earlier (too lazy to look up link - don't need the karma). That would draw less power than a Hard drive, yes? Anyone got numbers on how much?
Can anyone give a rough breakdown the typical power usage by subsystems in a laptop?
The drive, fan, and HD info is available. What about the rest of the parts?
Display, backlight, motherboards, CPU, etc...
Anyone already done the research?
As a kind of example, suppose the card was assigned a frame buffer address of memory, and reprogrammed to implement OpenGL transformations. Or perhaps load it up with Distributed Net, or a Quake server, or whatever.
Maybe, say, take a PCI ethercard, and modify it, adding a Crusoe processor, ramdisk, couple external connectors. Then the card acts like an ethercard which is connected directly to the embedded system. What I can't find is any documentation about how to interface the chip withought signing up as a Transmeta Developer Associate Member from an Approved Business Partner :-)
NEW! FEATURED Add your own mini-linux server, req'd: 1 PCI slot... NR
Clickety Click
Keep on dreaming, because they are pure vapor and Transmeta won't be around to see it through.
Benchmarks are supposed to capture real world usage. If you can design better tests, benchmark people would love to hear from you.
People used to do qualitative consideration of designs, support chips and stuff. That was just as awkward as trying to convince people that you're slim just by argumenting; refusing to step on a nearby scale. The introduction of benchmarks was progress, not regress.
It's true that other parts of a portable can draw more power than the CPU: the display is a huge drain. But it's still useful to have a low-drain CPU.
I would love to have a Crusoe laptop that was as small and light as a NEC MobilePro: no moving parts, just a lot of RAM and some flash memory. Put Linux on it instead of Windows CE. Put in a Lithium ion battery. Give it a PC card slot so we can put in a 5 GB hard drive card if we want. It would rock. Sure the display would suck more power than the Crusoe, but why make the situation worse by going with some other CPU?
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The main power drain is the display, followed by the disk. The CPU doesn't make much difference.
a VLIW architecture needs good compiler support: you gotta file in all the slots of each VLIW instruction ahead of time (at compile time)! How much parallelism can you detect at compile time? Depends on the application, how much code specialization and duplication you wanna.
The idea, though, is that this will be a win in the end (over purely dynamic scheduling) because, among other things, it vastly simplifies the instruction decode stage (and dispatch as well, I think) of the CPU. For certain applications of interest, the instruction decode is the primary bottleneck: whether because you're missing instruction cache, or because you just hafta do so much work to determine the data dependencies, register renaming, etc. that an out-of-order issue processor requires.
What seems strange to me is that the Crusoe is x86 ISA compatible. THis must mean it's doing all the VLIW instruction packing on the fly. My guess is that's not gonna fly, ehhe. What's VLIW buying you in this case?
I'm not an expert on VLIW, but that's my figurin.
Check out http://www.vanshardware.com/articles/2001/septembe r/010921_Transmeta_v_C3/010921_Transmeta_v_C3.htm for an interesting read.
about this whole Transmeta thing is the level of speculation and un-clearness.
/ 28365403.pdf. The datasheets says thermal power 10.1 Watt max. Well, we never _ever_ get that high. Also, the newer 500 Mhz ultra low power is 8 Watt max, 5 Watt under more normal conditions.
Talk all the shit you want about Intel, but I can tell you that I'm working on a board right now that uses a Mobile Celeron Mobile 400A: http://developer.intel.com/design/mobile/datashts
The thing is that TM _never_ published said figures (quickly: what's the MAX Watts a TM CPU can draw?), because supposedly all that we need to know is the power required to decode a DVD. Well, today that happens largely by the VGA controller now, doesn't it?
What suprises me even more is that Torvalds, if anyone, should know that using the simple HLT instruction in the idle thread, makes any Intel (or AMD) CPU draw a lot less power.
Even on paper I don't see the advantage of the TM CPU's. And I really hoped they would, believe me...
It's intersting that the airport doesn't afffect battery life.
I have a sony crusoe picturebook with a double battery. I usually get 5+ hours out of it (pretty unimpressive in my opinion), but with a pcmcia wireless card in it, I get less than 1 hour before dead battery.
YMMV
I've been posting on the net since 1994 and I still haven't come up with a good sig!
Not only from the software point of view - it would make available a commodity-priced PowerPC motherboard, something which seems to be rather thin on the ground at the moment.
BTW, you aren't restricted to Mac OS for PowerPC - I got a set of AIX 5L CDs by being a signed-up "Solution Partner".
The transmeta chip in current production
...
RMS pwr usage = 2 watts
battery life = almost an entire work day
heat dissipation = no cpu fan needed
As for pwr hungry laptop displays, behold
0 01 122002989.htm
a brave new world : (albeit 6 yr wait)
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2000nov/gee20
What's wrong with Mandrake 8.0 for PPC? Doesn't it run on the iBook?
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
Is a crusoe based home server. Not because of the power consumption, but the idea of reducing the fan noise. A home file server/ipmasq system needs very little processor power. Crusoe could be an important step in making a modern silent system at a reasonable price. Right now I have a Pentium-60 without fan doing the job, but a little more speed would be nice.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
...another CPU that won't meet its marketed hype, and will ship really, really late.
this discussion is sorely lacking in details. The new device is a highly integrated ...). This news item at linuxdevices.com has the details.
system-on-chip based on a TM5000 core plus north & south bridges and a 2D graphics controller, along with some other assorted interfaces (serial ports, IDE controller, audio interface, USB,
Because it has a 6 hour battery life, and I have tested it in MacOS & Linux
VK3TST
-- "People aren't stupid. Usually." -- jd
Well, I haven't measured -- but I also haven't noticed any difference. Certainly not cutting from 5 hours to 1. I'd be surprised if it makes even 20 minutes difference, but I'm not planning to take it out in order to run a controlled experiment :)
I really am somewhat disappointed in the battery life, but then again a spare battery is something I wish I had anyhow.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Nope.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5