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Transmeta Meets Blades

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the are-there-any-vampires dept.

The Griller writes "Gordon Bell, one of the creators of VAX, and Linus Torvalds were at the launch of a new supercomputing platform at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Based on Crusoe processors from Transmeta and running a version of linux, it is aimed at being cheaper than conventional supercomputers by requiring no cooling and lower maintenance. " Basically, it's blade clustering, using Beowulf.

3 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. I've got to wonder by Arker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've got to wonder why they are using Crusoes. It's a good chip for the application, don't get me wrong... but the last I heard the main advantage it has over StrongARM is x86 compatibility, which shouldn't be an issue here.

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  2. Post-X86 clustering by baka_boy · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Personally, I'd much rather have a rack of XServe 1U boxes than Transmeta chips -- G4 processors may not be quite as power-efficent as Transmetas, but they also run at higher clock speeds, have two processors per mobo, give you fast 128-bit vector processing unit (very nice for scientific calculation), and still beat the pants off of PIII/IV and Athlon chips in the power/heat/size arena.


    The only trick would be getting the things to work properly in a headless configuration -- Apple won't ship them without a graphics card, but I'm relatively certain that you could get a LinuxPPC installation to work even without the card installed.

  3. Why limit yourself to x86 by eagl · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why limit yourself to the x86 instruction set when the transmeta processor just needs a new instruction set decoder to emulate pretty much ANY processor? It seems like while they'll be able to use lots of existing software out there, they could get even more performance, efficiency, or maybe just easier programming by using whatever instruction set makes sense for the project.

    It's all in the pre-processing with the crusoe, x86 is just there for slideways compatibility and doesn't need to be a limiting factor. When you're using a custom computer, whether it's one or a thousand crusoe processors, wouldn't it make sense to try for some compiler efficiency based on the actual hardware instead of the 8086 legacy?