Transmeta Unveils 256-bit Microprocessor Plans

nam37 writes "PCWorld has an article about how Transmeta has outlined its initial plans for a new 256-bit microprocessor dubed the TM8000. They claim it will offer significant advantages over their current TM5x00 line of chips. The processor will be a switch to a 256-bit VLIW (very long instruction word), allowing twice as many instructions in one clock cycle and greater energy efficiency." The article also touches on the popularity Transmeta enjoys in Japan, noting that 92% (CD: corrected from 55%) of the company's revenue comes from there.

Comments

"makes no predictions on availability date"

[blumpy]

Who knows when this will be available... could be years, this might just be a way to boost stock value temporarily without consequence for several years.

How will this chip be energy efficient?

[JebusIsLord]

Could someone please explain to me how you can make an energy efficient comparitively simple chip with 256-bit data paths? I thought increasing the bits made chips much more complex, which kind of goes against exactly what Transmeta has been all about up until now. Please explain to me as I assume they know what they are doing.

Re:How will this chip be energy efficient?

[NanoGator]

I'm curious about this as well. Is this the type of thing that could make people forget about Itanium, or is this case where an insane # of bits means it's not practical for anything useful?

Re:How will this chip be energy efficient?

[Kindaian]

It is very complex but from what i grasp, by using very complex instructions, you archieve multiple simultaneous tasks with unrelated data easly. With other platforms, to do that, you must allow for the processor to do the thinking of that and coach the internal instructions to flow the correct way.

The chip design can be thrus much simpler. On the other hand, by using a code-morph as it's "public" layer, the chip can be adapted to almost any requirement, making it very popular for... yes... making gadgets... and that is life and blood in Japan.

[how i liked to have a devkit for transmeta... but here in Europe, that is not only hard to find, but not a *must* for this market]

Cheers...

P.S.- Can someone pls add a JVM inside the new transmeta processor? Why run x86 when you can run bytecode directly?

Sony and Transmeta - in like Flynn

[ObviousGuy]

Sony's got quite a few Transmeta-based PCs in Japan. My favorite is the thumbpad PC, but I digress...

Transmeta has been promising a lot of things since they were formed those many years ago. Nothing of substance has ever come out, though. Sure we've now got a low-power processor, so what? It comes at the cost of serious lack of speed.

Now they promise 256-bit processors. That's great, but it's completely worthless when any chip that it is attempting to emulate maxes out at 64-bits. Hell, the 64-bit chips haven't even come out yet.

Transmeta is dying. Especially if they've hitched their horse to the floundering Japanese economy.

Faster is indeed better...

[coryboehne]

A very nice processor indeed, however I wonder what kind of speeds these things will soon be able to achieve? The thing that really blows me away is when you compare a Transmeta Crusoe TM5400/TM5600 728mhz which on distributed.net can do about 1,966,230 keys a second, with a Power PC 7450/7455 G4 1600mhz that can do a whopping 16,991,648 keys per second! I understand that alpha is far superior, but the question that begs asking is why does'nt everyone go to alpha, especially considering the raw speed that can be achieved?

32-bits, 64-bits, 256-bits .... what's the limit ?

[Taco Cowboy]

First there was that 4-bit microprocessor, then it went to 8-bit, then 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit.

When Transmeta announced it's 256-bit microprocessor, I'm not surprise.

However, I do have a question ....

Is there a theoretical limit on the maximum
bit-path for microprocessors ?

Or in other words, will we see microprocessors with giga-bit (or even exa-bit) path ?

Memory Addressing, Parallel VLIW Issues

[peatbakke]

This is not memory addressing, it's just the width of the instruction pipeline -- I'm inclined to think this chip will probably have 32-bit addressing to be IA32 friendly, but of course, I don't know for sure.

There's nothing too spectacular about 256-bit instruction paths in VLIW processors, but I'm not sure this will offer the caliber of benefits they claim it will: VLIW instructions (which are usually bundles of smaller, discrete instructions) are by nature very complex beasts, and trying to shove two down the pipeline without the instructions stepping on each other's toes is a difficult process.

But, of course, I'm not working at Transmeta, so I really can't say what wonders they're working over there.

hobbyist motherboards?

[X_Caffeine]

I think Transmeta is really missing the boat on not having any OEM motherboards available for system builders and hobbyists. You could make a case for this market being the reason behind AMD's success with the Athlon.

I'm speaking out of self-interest, of course. I'd like to build a home, rack-mount style server with ultra-low energy requirements. As it is, I'm thinking about going with an iMac motherboard and Darwin, but I'd much rather use a Transmeta system with a standard Linux distribution.

I don't get it!

[Dr. Spork]

It looks to me like Transmeta chips are on absolutely tiny dies and use very little energy. For all those compromises, the performance seems acceptable. Now, I'm not a chip designer, and that may be reflected in my next comment... but I'm asking myself why don't they just stick more transistors onto the die, and maybe more cache? I mean, if a Crusoe were scaled up to the die size/power consumption of a P4 or an Athlon, it seems to me it would kick their asses, even with the code-morphing handicap.

Now I know it's more complicated than just adding more transistors. Still, though, they seem to have a good design, and it seems to me like they should just add more horsepower to each part of the chip. It would have the potential to be a great server chip, and if my wildest dreams came true, it would outperform the Motorolla's best chips by such a margin that Apple would pay Linus to write a code-morphing routine to have the chip emulate a PowerPC. It would be a seamless transition for Mac users, and it would make Macs competitive again for price-conscious performance users.

Re:It's not a 256b datapath, but a 256b VLIW word.

[bentini]

A) Because Transmeta is VLIW, they don't speculatively execute. That's the whole point, Instruction Fetch/Decode (two of the bottlenecks in traditional architectures) have been more or less eradicated because it's so simple. So, really, that point is completely not true. At the moment, my lab group has a chip whose instruction size is about 5-600 bits (I can never remember). Impressive, until you realize that it isn't.

B) The translation doesn't have to be that great. They're still performing fairly competitively with Intel chips.

C) Pentiums don't play well enough. Transmeta can simulate fairly well a several hundred megahertz (probably about 4-500) Pentium III. Also, Intel is notoriously bad at doing such things. Their memory is not written down on how to make such chips, but only remembered in the minds of the workers. It would be VERY hard for them to do that, actually.

D) Transmeta based solutions have often employed other cool ideas in terms of power consumption: Better LCD's that don't need backlights, e.g. Not perfect, but getting there.

E) Transmeta's solution is so amazing that, even if it hasn't revolutionized the world, it has changed the course of Intel's strategy non-trivially. Plus, it's awesomely cool.

transmeta's income statement

[sketchkid]

transmeta's income statement this was released on the 16th. i think it has some interesting numbers. if you look at net income (loss) at the bottom and add all 4 quarters up, thats the loss for the past 12 months. ouch, $179,432,000