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.

Comments

And yet....

[Reality Master 101]

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.

Re:And yet....

[shayne321]

I have to agree.. I really wanted to like Transmeta. Admittedly at first I fell into the "hey, Linus is behind it so it must be good mindset". Then once they unveiled the code-morphing (or whatever it's called) technology I was really impressed. Wow, what a great idea, I thought - virtualizing the core of the processor and doing optimizations of the x86 instructions on the fly.. Not only should this be faster, but would theoretically allow the chip to run on many different architectures simply by updating the emulation/optimization layer. I thought it was one of the most innovative things I've seen in a while. Somehow they've managed to screw it all up.

First of all, performance has never been there.. They can't even seem to get close to mid-range AMD and intel chips, so they changed position to "well, it's a LOW POWER consumption chip for laptops". Like the previous poster said, even if you half the consumption of the CPU unless you work on the LCD and other components you'll only increase battery life by a few percent. To the average user that's just not worth having to buy a more expensive and unproven chip.

The only other market I could see for them would be in an embedded pc market where a company sold hardware products spanning several architectures and wanted one a single processor they could work with intimately rather than having to learn the quirks of different processors on each architecture they have. Honestly I've racked my brain and can't even think of an example of such a company.. Maybe Cisco? I'm not THAT familiar with their hardware but maybe it spans more than one architecture.

Moral of the story: Just because someone puts out something you enjoy doesn't mean you'll enjoy everything they put out. That's the flawed logic that caused me to actually sit through an entire episode of That's my Bush! (shudder) What a stinking pile of horse-dung that was.

Shayne

Re:are AMD and Intel full of it?

[Lxy]

From what I've heard, that 8 hour benchmark came from marketing. I don't believe the Transmeta chip can quite stack up to that. Good news is that it does well (4 or 5 hours?) against the power hungry Intel/AMD offerings. Results: less heat, longer battery life, smaller package. Sony has a nice subnotebook running a Crusoe chip, looks tempting but pricey. Transmeta will need a few more years to be taken seriously but given time they'll start showing up in cell phones, PDAs, car stereos, etc without enlarging the package.

Re:Transmeta is a sad joke: Where are the numbers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Their Code Morphing layer is antagonistic towards the benchmarks you mentioned, mainly because it runs lots of different tests that don't allow the code morph software to optimize. On real world tests they'd probably have better results.

I think a fairer comparison would be performance/watts rather than a synthetic bench that doesn't stress how much work you can do. It should also take into consideration the support chips that other traditional CPUs require (it looks like they're building in a bunch of other stuff that you'de need secondary chips for on Intel and AMD).