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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.
fist toast. ] Linux rules. I dont like lameness filters
Transmeta is a fucked company anyway. They'll be dead in the water soon enough.
yes!
oh, and looky there... TMTA is UP a whopping 32 cents!!!
Nope, not me, I must be someone else...
... cause if they don't they're in the crapper.
Wait, they already are in the crapper, so I guess they'd be flushed...
Quality straight pr0n goes here
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
You don't need to be Linus to predict Transmeta's future. For all practical purposes, Transmeta is dead.
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 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!!!!
mod this goddamn shit up nigger-ass mods
Audi's line of automobiles are the 9-3, 9-4 and 9-5 to replace their 900 and 9000 names and adding a new 90000.
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.
At the heart of the breakdown of the Middle East talks lies the refusal of
the Zionist state to accept the right of return for the Palestinians who
lost their homes and country after the establishment of the state of
Israel in 1948. The first of a two-part article on this subjectIsrael
and the Palestinian right of returnappeared yesterday. The following is
the concluding part.
While Israel continues to deny Palestinians the right of return, one of
the first pieces of legislation passed by the new state was the Law of
Return, enabling Jews from all over the world to come and live in Israel.
In the aftermath of the Second World War there were hundreds of thousands
of Jews living in desperate conditions in displaced persons camps
throughout Europe, as well as many others facing rampant anti-Semitism and
discrimination. With few countries willing to take them, Israel provided
their only possibility of a home.
The Israeli legislation was not simply a humanitarian measure aimed at
providing a refuge for Jews facing persecution, however. Immigration to
provide manpower was vital if the fledgling state was to survive and its
businesses were to have access to cheap labour. The Zionist state
therefore actively encouraged the immigration of Jews to Israel and
between 1948 and 1952 the Jewish population doubled.
After an initial huge influx of Jews from Eastern Europe, Stalin initiated
a vicious anti-Semitic campaign; Jews faced frame-up trials and the doors
were closed to Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. So Israel turned
to the Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa for new sources of
immigration.
It used all means at its disposal to achieve this, going far beyond what
would generally be considered encouragement.
The case of the Iraqi Jews is the most well known, and is documented in
several books (see Moshe Gat's The Jewish Exodus from Iraq 1948-1951 and
Shlomi Hillel's Operation Babylon). The Zionist underground, backed by
Mossad le-Aliya, the forerunner of the Israeli security service, sent
agents provocateurs abroad to create conditions whereby Jews would leave
their homes and come to Israel. As a result of Mossad activities, in the
space of a few weeks more than 120,000 Jewsalmost the entire community in
Iraqwere forced to leave their homes and possessions for Israel. Until
the onset of Zionist-Palestinian conflict and the inflaming of political
tensions by Britain's stooge regime under King Feisal and Prime Minister
Nuri Said in Iraq, Jews had lived there without incident for 2,500 years,
since the Babylonian exile from biblical Palestine.
Israel was not the destination of choice for the Iraqi Jews. A privileged
few, those with money and connections, went to the West. But the majority
lived in Israeli camps, where food and medicines were in short supply,
until homes in development towns could be built on the ruins of
Palestinian villages.
In subsequent years, entire communities of Jews from all over the Middle
East and North Africa, who had had no interest in Zionism and had not
faced discrimination or the anti-Semitism so prevalent in Europe, came to
Israel They now form the majority in Israel. Both the size and speed of
this exodus gives rise to the suspicion that in some cases at least, deals
were done. Morocco's King Hassan was subsequently able to call on Mossad's
services in Paris to dispose of Ben Barka, a political opponent, in
circumstances that have never been clarified. The Royalist forces in Yemen
received support from the Israeli Defence Force in their murderous civil
war against the Republicans who were backed by Egypt's Nasser.
Thus, irrespective of their stated motives and intentions, and despite
their anti-Israeli rhetoric, the viability of the Zionist state was
crucially dependent upon the actions of the Arab bourgeoisie.
Today the population of Israel has grown to over 6 million, including more
than 1 million Russians who left after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It is widely believed that many of these are non-Jews, who were desperate
to escape the widespread poverty and misery that followed Russia's
economic collapse. This in turn has infuriated the religious authorities,
who fear the diminution of their power.
At the very least, the enormous expansion of Israel's population refutes
any claim that there was not enough room in Israel-Palestine or the means
to support an enlarged Palestinian citizenry. The crucial question for
Zionism was that the expansion has been Jewish and at the expense of the
Palestinians. Those Palestinians who continued to live inside Israel have
been treated as second-class citizens: Israeli Palestinians do not have
the same rights as Israeli Jews. Ninety-three percent of the land is now
characterised as Jewish land, meaning that no non-Jew is allowed to lease,
sell or buy it. Thus the Land Rules have not just made the Palestinians
into refugees, they have also worked to dispossess them of their property
within Israel itself. Furthermore until 1966, Palestinian Israelis were
ruled by military ordinance.
The Six-Day War and Israeli military occupation
After the Six-Day War in June 1967, when Israel seized East Jerusalem, the
West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights in Syria, many Palestinians became
refugees for a second time. They were forced to leave their homes and flee
to Jordan and the Lebanon. Palestinian resistance to the military
occupation that followed the war provoked a brutal response from the
Israeli army. Whole villages were razed to the ground and families
expelled. This vicious sequence was repeated over and over again as the
Israelis drove the Palestinians further away from their original homes.
The Palestinian-Israeli scholar Nur Masalha details how the Zionists
planned and implemented programmes to rid the Promised Land of its
native people in his book A Land without a People: Israel, Transfer and
the Palestinians, 1949-96. He explains that this policy continued well
after the 1948-49 war and involved not just the politicians and military
forces, but also Israeli intellectuals. It included transfer, massacresas
in the case of Kfir Qasimhousing demolitions and expulsions.
Jewish settlements were established in the newly occupied lands within
weeks of the war, not by right-wing zealots but by the party of
government, the Labour Party. As Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell explains
in his book The Founding Myths of Israel, Despite the impression that
some of the founders of the labour movement, motivated by internal
political struggles, have attempted to create, everyone in the
coalitionboth the founders and their successorswere united in pursuing a
policy of fait accompli in the occupied territories. Despite the divisions
in the Mapai [Labour] since the mid-1940s, the family of Mapai remained
true to the doctrine of never giving up a position or a territory unless
one is compelled by a superior force.
As Sternhell explains, while the then Prime Minister Levi Eshkol feared
the consequences of such a move, he had no ideological alternative to
offer. His failure to prevent the colonising of the Occupied Territories
stemmed not from personal weaknesses, but from the fact that he had no
response to the Zionist argument that if Jews could live in the Arab towns
and neighbourhoods of Jaffa and Haifa and consider them their legitimate
homes, there was no reason to prevent them living in Palestinian Nablus or
Hebron.
According to Sternhell, Golda Meir, who followed Eshkol as prime minister,
was chosen precisely because she wholeheartedly embraced the nationalist
perspective of the Labour Zionists and appealed to history as proof of the
legitimacy, morality and exclusivity of the Jewish people's right to the
country. For her, there was room for only one national movement in
Palestinea Jewish one. This was why she prohibited the use of terms such
as Palestinian national movement and Palestinian state'' on Israeli
state radio and television.
The promulgation by the government of literally hundreds of occupiers'
laws directly contravened not only the tenets of the United Nations'
Universal Declaration of Human Rights but the Geneva Conventions as well.
These violations of basic democratic rights included administrative
detention, mass land expropriations, forced movement of populations, and
torture.
Palestinians were made homeless and whole areas were ethnically cleansed
so that Israelis, often new immigrants, could be housed. Initially it was
only the right-wing zealots, determined to colonise the West Bank (known
as Judea and Samaria in biblical Palestine), who came to the new
settlements. But it was only possible to populate them by offering
financial inducements, in the form of subsidies and tax rebates, to
encourage poor Israelis to settle there who otherwise had no chance of
obtaining decent, affordable housing. Even after talks to reach a
negotiated resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resulted in the
1993 Oslo Accords, settlement building did not abate. The opposite
occurred, it increased, transforming the demography of the West Bank and
Jerusalem.
As a result of the 1967 Six-Day War and Israeli reprisals against those
suspected of supporting the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), many
Palestinians fled to Jordan. Three years later, many were hounded out of
Jordan in a military campaign by King Hussein, aided by Israel, in what
became known as Black September, and fled to Lebanon.
The Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 created further
displacements as the Palestinians left their homes in southern Lebanon and
moved to Beirut to avoid Israeli air raids. Many Palestinians thus became
refugees several times over. Israel's 18-year occupation of southern
Lebanon was accompanied by frequent aerial bombardments that destroyed
countless Arab homes and villages. The Palestinians, despite their
expulsion from their homes in 1948 and 1967, were never safe from the
extended arm of Israel's military and secret service, even in their place
of refuge.
Palestinian homes were no more sacrosanct in Jerusalemthe eternal and
undivided capital of Israel, according to the Zionists. Under vaguely
defined and discriminatory rules, Palestinians who live there lose their
residency rights if they are unable to prove that Jerusalem is the centre
of their life. The loss of residency rights means expulsion from
Jerusalem and exile to a village in the West Bank, where access to
Jerusalem is denied.
The 1993 Oslo Accords
The Labour politicians Shimon Pereswho played a major role in securing
the Oslo agreement in 1993and Yitzhak Rabinwho signed the accordsdid
not do so because of some Damascene conversion to the legitimacy of
Palestinian national rights. An agreement offered the most rational
solution to the conflict from the perspective of Israel's own national
interests. They postponed the resolution of the most difficult issuesthe
refugee question and the status of Jerusalemto later talks, in the hope
of first getting agreement on borders and land transfers.
The right-wing opposition within Israel has obstructed every step of the
protracted Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In the final analysis,
despite the majority of Israelis supporting an end to the conflict, the
Labour Party and its liberal and secular supporters have been unable to
oppose the right-wing fundamentalists. The relationship between the
secular Labourites, the peace movement and the religious nationalists is
much closer than might appear on the surface. All share a perspective
based on upholding claims to an historical and religious Jewish right to
Palestine, which dictated the Palestinian expulsions and precludes the
recognition of similar rights for the Palestinians.
The liberal historian Benny Morris, who has quite correctly exposed the
way Israel forcibly ejected the Palestinians from their homes in order to
establish the Zionist state, exemplifies this outlook. His nationalist
perspective renders him blind to the logical implications of his own work.
He wrote in Britain's Guardian newspaper: The spectacle of Palestinian
rejection of the reasonable terms offered by President Clinton and the
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak (Israeli withdrawal from 95 percent of
the West Bank and the Arab half of Jerusalem, and Palestinian statehood),
and the insistence on the refugees' right of return to their homes, towns
and villages in pre-1967 Israel, is alienating most Israelis and
undermining the sympathy that the past decades of suffering and peace
negotiations have engendered.
He concluded his article by saying, Almost all Israeli Jews, including
myself, believe that whatever the rights and wrongs of 1948, and whoever
was to blame for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, a
solution based on their repatriation to Israel would spell the destruction
of the Jewish state (emphasis added throughout).
United Socialist States of the Middle East
This brief review of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows
that any recognition of the Palestinians' right of return, however
circumscribed, immediately raises the undemocratic character of the
Zionist regime and its essential inviability.
As this article has sought to show, it is a myth to say that the state of
Israel was established in a land without people. On the contrary, the
state of Israel was created as a result of the planned and systematic
expulsion of the Palestinian people.
Moreover, Israel cannot be regarded as any kind of progressive society,
committed to social equality and the advancement of all its peoples. The
Zionist state enshrines discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs.
It is a society riven from top to bottom with social and political
divisions of a most explosive character.
Despite posturing as a new form of society, founded on equality and
quasi-socialist principles, from its origins Israel has been a garrison
state, surrounded by hostile neighbours, with the army serving as the
central pillar of society.
The tragic irony of the Zionist solution to the oppression of the Jewish
peopletraditionally and historically connected with a struggle for
tolerance and freedomhas been the brutal suppression of another oppressed
people. In consequence, the right-wing forces cultivated by the Zionist
state now threaten to reproduce within Israel the same conditions of
dictatorship and civil war from which an earlier generation of Jews fled.
The only way out of the current dead end is the development of a political
movement to unite Arab and Jewish workers and intellectuals in a common
struggle against capitalism and for the building of a socialist society.
This also offers the only means of genuinely redressing the historic
iniquities suffered by the Palestinian workers and peasants, and ending
the twin evils of oppression and war that are fuelled by the profit drive
of international capital and the native ruling elites. The creation of a
United Socialist States of the Middle East would remove the artificial
borders that presently divide the peoples and economies of the region,
enabling its plentiful resources to be utilised in order to fulfil the
social, economic and democratic aspirations of all its peoples.
On the way home from work today I stopped at a grocery store. While I was standing in line I noticed a muslim woman (complete with headgear) ahead of me. As you might understand, this filled me with anger. I snatched the items she was waiting to buy right out of her hands and told her to get the hell out of the store and the hell out of my country. She ran off. The store manager told me I was being disorderly and asked me to leave. I complied, but several customers and a couple of store employees ran out after me. They shook my hand and congratulated me on having had the guts to do the right thing.
... 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.
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.
*VLIW is dying!
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 [...]"
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
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
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?
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He's smarter than that.
saru mo ki kara ochiru
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
hey, tim, were you a plan II major? just wondering. you seem like one.
Hi, I'm a pretentious cock who will make some gay comment about ignoring AC posts here.
Nope.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5