Via One-ups Transmeta

An aonymous reader submitted that"Via just announced the Eden platform, which promises lower power consumption than Transmeta. If it follows the C3 line of CPUs, I'm guessing it will also deliver much better performance at a lower cost (the C3s gave significantly better performance than Transmeta, but at just under 10W, so a bit more power)."

Comments

If only Transmeta would release a different CPU

[Drakino]

The low power chips are nice and all, but where is the CPU showing off Transmeta's true technology? All that code morphing stuff should enable a laptop to be made with a switch labeled "G4" or "x86".

Re:If only Transmeta would release a different CPU

[stripes]

All that code morphing stuff should enable a laptop to be made with a switch labeled "G4" or "x86"

The TM CPUs have a lot of x86 like functionality wired into them. Sure they don't execute x86 code, but they do have x86 style MMUs, not PowerPC ones. They do set their condition flags based on when an x86 would, not a PowerPC. The 40 or so GP registers they have is plenty to try to emulate a CPU that only has 4 or so, but not so good for CPUs that really have 16 or 32 (you need to use some registers for the morphing code, some to hold state that may not come to pass, some...).

The current Transmeta chips are not x86 CPUs, but they emulate x86 CPUs far far better then they can emulate any other CPU. This could be addressed by future TM CPUs, but only by adding things that mostly wouldn't be of use to them while being an x86, so if x86 is where 95+% of the market is, it may make sense to not even make the TM CPUs 6% more complex... let alone the morphing software 100% more complex.

Re:If only Transmeta would release a different CPU

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus knows the i386 architecture inside out and backwards, better than anyone else his age. Transmeta needed to emulate the i386 in the Crusoe VLIW chip, and hired Linus to make it work.

The Crusoe wasn't Linus' vision, he was hired to make it work. If it fails or not on the market is not his problem.

He won't have trouble finding a Linux-friendly job if Transmeta dies.

So what is Transmeta for, anyway?

[DaveWood]

I'm hoping the more clever watchers of the semiconductor industry can enlighten me on this. As far as I can tell, Transmeta has been an expensive and overhyped flop.

They came out with low power consumption CPUs that, while cool, aren't THAT cool, really (to the point where Intel and AMD immediately responded with conventional laptop CPUs that were in the same spec ballpark), and weren't that fast, either. In fact, when you sit down with them, they're quite slow for the $$$. And that was they debuted - let alone now, in Q1 2002. Their design involved doing IA emulation right above the silicon, which sounds wacky to me; fine, advances in runtime optimization lately are quite interesting (hotspot) but it doesn't sprout wings and fly, and I can't see how we could ever expect it to.

Then we have the fact that virtually no one sells transmeta-based products, and some significant percentage of the few companies that said they would, have since backed out of the deal (which screams trouble with the product).

Maybe I'm just too cynical. Yes, everybody loves them because they're competing with Intel and they're a patron of Linux. Please, tell me why I'm wrong about this. I'd love to be convinced their killer app is right around the corner.

If I'm right, though, they should call it a day, shut down now and return whatever money they have left to their investors...

Re:WinCE only for StrongARM?

[thing12]

I know, I think it ran on MIPS as well? ... Anyhow, I don't remember it ever running on x86...

Actually it runs on 12 processor architectures, including x86 and MIPS.

Pocket PC is kind of a separate beast from Windows CE. It's basically CE plus a bunch of extensions that make it fit the needs of PDA users better. It may very well only be available for StrongARM.