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:Excellent..

[YKnot]

There are more energy-hogs in a laptop than just the cpu. Display, harddisk and recently the graphics accelerators need a good share of the battery life. Decreasing the power consumption of the cpu alone won't get us very much closer to the one-day-per-charge laptop, although it's certainly a step in the right direction. Other interesting applications of less wasteful processors are clusters and servers, which otherwise need expensive cooling.

WinCE only for StrongARM?

[class_A]

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?

TMTA:RIP

[Ars-Fartsica]

Its fairly obvious at this point that there is little to no commercial support for the Transmeta product line.

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.

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...

Speaking of laptop power savings: LED backlights?

[timothy]

I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable than me can shed light (ha ha) on the possibilities for white-LED backlights in laptops.

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 :) !), 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.

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

Re:Speaking of laptop power savings: LED backlight

[Salamander]

So why don't we see some low-power LED-light screens?

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.