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Transmeta Astro Processor
simpl3x writes "Apparently, Transmeta's next generation processor was demonstrated to some folks the other day at Comdex. Tom's Hardware was at the demo and they had this to say: "The new Transmeta Astro was faster in every demo that we saw than the Pentium 4m 1.8GHz chip that was in the Sony GRX." Cnet had some information on the processor also . I just ordered a tablet to play with, though I ordered the Fujitsu which has a P3m (the Compaq has a bad screen according to the reviews). I certainly wish that something like this were available, and i do hope that the manufacturing goes smoothly. Mo options, mo better."
I was fortunate enough to see this cpu in action at a press demo and I must say I was sadly dissapointed...
The lack of sse2 support greatly hindered this chip in any fps demo, where it was brutalized by the p4 (I'm sure even an amd athlon could beat it under those conditions!).
The 'code morphing' technology also uses an astonishing amount of ram, up to 64mb in some cases, so linux users who need all that ram for gnome should steer clear of this chip. I also noticed that compared to a p4 based system, it was quite unstable, requiring a reboot in windows98se after just 2 hours of demonstrations. I have also heard, from reliable sources, that boards using this chip can only run at agp 2x, which again can hinder game performance.
For power desktop use forget about using this chip, although I'm sure for student or 'dumb terminal' use this chip is suitable.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
From the CNET article "It will consume less power than the company's first Crusoe chips, the TM 5000 series, but offer substantially more performance, said Chief Technical Officer David Ditzel."
Wow... and according to tramsmetazone the thing was running at 500 mhz for the demo (against a speedstepped pentium) WOW.
According to the CNet article (which actually had more information in it), the Astro will have lower power consumption than their current and competing chips. There is also mention that this is to compete directly with Intel's mobile chip. So I guess the answer is, that yes, they will be doing laptops. Of course, I thought that was what they were aiming for all along.
Again, as mentioned in the CNet article, "Transmeta executives, though, indicated that the company would beat Banias in price." The Banias is Intel's soon-to-be-released next mobile chip. It should be at least fifty dollars less than Banias, but twenty dollars more than Celeron.
the astro does have an integrated chipset. Transmeta is not a big enough company to have many different chipset models developed so they ussually go with the cheapest chipset model with the lowest power consumption.
agp 2x was chosen for power reasons, as 4x would have pushed the (relatively underpowered) chipset and cpu too far.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
Are you a troll? ...lack of sse2... ...uses an astonishing amount of ram...64mb... ...unstable... ...only run at agp 2x...
It doesn't even run X86 natively!
64mb or ram costs 15$ The price difference between the P4 and the transmeta will easily be more than that. Buy more ram!
It hasn't even been released. Kernel 2.5 isn't all that stable, but no one complains because it is a testing/prototype.
The speed of the agp bus has been shown to be inconsequential to the performance.
The rumor is that the demo chip is running at 500Mhz at the moment. Comparing that to the 1.8ghz P4 suddenly doesn't seem so out of proportion does it? I gaurantee you it will be running at at least 1ghz when it's finally released. The final board for it (not the notoriously shoddy reference boards) will perform better as the memory bandwidth will probably be improved.
What if I had done the same review of the Itanium 6 mo. before it was released? It was running at 400Mhz, couldn't run X86 software as fast as a 266, and was practically an unstable toaster oven.
Karma Clown
SSE2 is used by so few apps that its not very useful for 99% of the stuff people are doing. As far as agp support only being 2x, thats the motherboard's (well northbridge's) responsilibility, not cpu. And besides, agp is a joke, anything more then 2x gives you ZERO performance increase.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Consequently, it multi-processor transmeta systems will outperform single processor Intels dissipating the same amount of heat. This also translates to higher reliability. If the memory busses are done correctly, having inexpensive multi-processors may alos provide significant performance enhancements over a single CPU. (for example, if memory bottlenecks dominate then multiple simple processors that are stalled witing on memory will ustilize every memeory fetch perfectly, whereas a pipelined single processor will waste a large fraction of the memory fetches making it slower).
A schematic of the current trends look something like this.
.......ioo......
|...........i.t..
|..........i.t..
|..........it...
H.........it....
E........it.....
A........i......
T.......i......
|.....io..o.....
|....io.........
|___i____________
Speed--->
o = Transmeta
i = pentium
t = former trendline
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Lack of SSE2 is a bummer but unless you're doing content creation or playing new games it won't matter.
Lack of SSE2 will not matter for any games, new or otherwise, because none of them use double-precision floats in any speed critical code paths. It'll hurt you if you want to render with Lightwave on your laptop, or run fluid dynamics simulations, or whatever. Not games.