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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)."
Even if this doesn't pan out to be as good as it sounds, I love to see competition in this area. I would really like to have a fanless computer for my desktop, and a laptop that can last for more than a day on a full charge AND run some high-falutin' graphics & games..
air and light and time and space
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".
Taken from webpage:
"...industry standard x86 architecture, the VIA Eden Embedded System Platform is fully compatible with Microsoft Windows XP and a full range of Embedded Windows, Windows CE..."
I thought WinCE/PocketPC was now only built for the StrongARM processor, or am I missing something?
Personally, I don't see low power as being Transmeta's primary selling point. I am much more interested in their code morphing software. I don't see where VIA's solution fits in. If you want a low power consumption PC type device, then are we still talking about an "embedded" device?
I'd wait before I heard an independent review from someone rather than going off of the hype from a company. I find that independent sources give you the real details on if something truly is a better product.
Power consumption and heat dissipation are issues to consumers and manufacturers, but clearly not enough to warrant employing a lower performance architecture at this point. Added to which, it appears that competitors were capable of rolling out competing technology far too quickly - Transmeta never hada chance to get support.
At this point it seems that the smartest thing Transmeta can do is start shopping its assets around to possible suitors.
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...
We're on the road to Tycho.
I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable than me can shed light (ha ha) on the possibilities for white-LED backlights in laptops.
:) !), and power consumption on white LEDs is ridiculously low. As I understand it, the backlight is the biggest draw in a lot of laptops, especially turned up bright.
:)
Certain high-end digital cameras (like the newest Nikon SLRs) have white LED backlights for their LCD displays. White LED prices are dropping (USD7.88 for a nice little waterproof, floating flashlight at Walmart
So why don't we see some low-power LED-light screens? I'd pay $200 more easily for my next laptop if it got (for instance) 50% more battery life.
What's stopping those? Considering that there are now several approaches (AMD, Intel, Transmeta and now VIA) to saving power on laptop processors, what about the other powerhogs?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Moreover, there are some other oddities in the description, like the Integrated 192KB internal L1/L2 cache (well ... what's the size of L1 ? )
The Raven.
The Raven
Anybody know what/if the markting people had any ideas with the name?
Thomas S. Iversen
Transmeta may end up being a business failure, but they will have achieved what they set out to do: delivering low power consuming chips to consumers. The chips just might just might not end up being supplied by Transmeta.
All in all, we the consumers win. It's doubtful Intel or AMD would have ever considered low power chips had it not been for Transmeta.
$45 per U Colocation Special
So you're saying that ten transmeta processors put out as much heat as a single P3 card solution? What exactly is the problem?
They look fine on my PS100, and D30. Nice even light, and decently bright (the PS100 can be seen in fairly bright sunlight, the D30 can't though), and no strong color casts. They seem to work decently in low and high temperatures (the iPod backlight, or maybe LCD doesn't seem to work so well in the cold, and I think it has a LED backlight).
I would believe "you can't make them big enough", or "can't make 'em big and cheep", or even "they have been using them for 14 months!", but I'm not buying "they look crappy".
Even the transistors used to draw Mickey Mouse on the die? What are all those transistors used for? Is there supposed to be some one-to-n correlation between "transistor" and "computing element" in Intel marketing?
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Isn't Crusoe below 1 Watt when it's idle, and at 6 Watts at full load?
Very stupid comparison.
Very simply, because LEDs aren't powerful enough. They might seem pretty bright when viewed directly, but when you're putting that light through a lossy backlight assembly onto the relatively large area of a laptop screen, and hoping that the result is sufficient to counteract ambient glare, you get a different impression. Frontlights are even worse.
Some vendors have tried replacing standard CCFLs with LEDs in PDA applications, where the screen size is smaller, and even there it has led to "customer acceptance issues". Translation: customers hated it. For the larger screens that laptops use, current-generation LED technology doesn't even merit serious consideration. With any luck, somebody will earn a Nobel prize figuring out how to make an ultra-bright LED that can compete with CCFL, but I wouldn't count on it.
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