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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."
And by god. I was actually impressed with this processor and the Transmeta booth in general.
Though it was small it was:
1) Manned by a really hot and nice chick! (always important).
2) Showed off what has been unanimously voted "My next laptop" by half of my company.
3) Actually contained a chip they let you hold. 1 word: SMALL
"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"
Does this processor still have low power consumption or is transmeta moving away from the small embeded market, maybe into laptops or other more sophisticated type applications?
I do security
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.
Faster in what type of demo? Dropping a Pentium 4M and an Astro from shoulder height? Being hurled from a clay-pigeon launcher? Downing pints of Guiness at the pub? Blah. Tom's Hardware is so bigoted against Intel after the famous Rambus stoush that anything they have to say on an Intel vs. Competitor story is essentially unreadable.
The competition between transmeta and intel & amd is strikingly similar to that between palm and handheld computers. One side promotes extended battery life, while the other promotes display quality and power. Unfortunately, at the moment, it doesn't look like both can be in the market for long. One will obviously emerge the winner. The news doesn't look like it's in favor of Transmeta, but maybe Linux and company can pull it off with his massive following.
I can already see that this new chip is going to work great in notebooks...but why not push it toward the desktop market too? The noise created and the amount of electricity used by some of today's desktops is horrible. This chip would allow a fast, ultra-quiet desktop (or tiny footprint computer) and won't ratchet up your electric bill by turning the computer on. Back to 200 watt power supplies anyone???
The interesting thing about the transmeta procs is that they make heavy use of caching to speed up instruction translation. Once the cache 'warms up' around a given application, performance is generally much better.
I for one would like to know what they meant by 'better performance' than the intel. Did they compare application startup speeds? Had the machine been running the apps previously? Granted I don't know any of the details, but from personal experience (I'm typing this on a transmeta-based fujitsu lifebook, at 866mhz) the current transmeta chips start applications extremely slowly and then progressively get more reponsive.
I like my laptop and am rooting for the astro! I'm very interested in how they improved the efficiency of their approach.
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Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
No real facts. Even when you read Toms.
So they optimized a few apps on the Transmeta, and pit it against a machine that has some unoptimized apps. To quote toms "DVD playback, Office Applications".
Ok were the even the same office and dvd playing apps? I can show you two different aps that do the same thing. One dog slow, one lightning quick. Put them each on machines with the same specs, and one will open faster than the other.
So give us name of the apps used. Start up times, were they optimized especially for the meta?
I would like to see this succeed, but I hate to see the hype.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Of course, I realise this is due to market pressures and that Transmeta just like AMD and Intel has to keep pushing their chips faster and faster to keep up with Moore's law, but nonetheless I lament that Code Morphing's full potential was never realised. Performance considerations aside, a processor that performed instruction decoding in software would have many more benefits. Support for new instruction set extensions like SSE or MMX could be added with a simple firmware upgrade. A new code-morphing frontend could turn the Crusoe from an x86-compatible chip to a PowerPC, MIPS, or SPARC-compatible chip in seconds (which would be a huge boon to embedded developers). A Code-Morphing core could be used as a testbed for new ideas in CPU and instruction set designs. The populations could have been endless. But alas, with Transmeta abandoning the technology, it's doomed to become "just another neat idea", like LISP machines and the Amiga before it.
I remember that the old Cyrix 6x86 chips didn't emulate the complete x86 instruction set, so many common programs would crash or just plain not run. It seems like transmeta is trying to go the same route, by reverse-engineering Intel's instruction set. The results of this kind of thing aren't always pretty, as you can see with such projects as WINE.
I know that Intel chips are the baseline platform for most business software written today, because of their market leadership position, and they seem to have the performance edge also. And the power-consumption issue is really a red herring, since on most portable systems the CPU is only a minor consumer of power (heat is another problem, but that is something that proper internal design can usually cure) compared with the display and hard disk. So is there really any reason to switch?
they concentrated on a desktop processor?
according to tramsmetazone the thing was running at 500 mhz for the demo
for desktop use with a chip made to run at 2ghtz this would be really impressive.
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.
they would obviously overcome these issues with a desktop processor
if they would do this and maintain the low power consumption that would really be impressive. we could all have really fast machines and keep the internal case temps below 100 degrees.
just a thought it would be nice to have a third option for desktop processors.
It may very well be that Java applications run as fast as "native" x86 code on TM chips. I wish they'd show JVM and CLR benchmarks on different CPUs. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that TM chips have an extra edge in less optimized code, such as that produced by JITs. HP did some research on code morphing from PA-RISC to PA-RISC (yes, that makes it much easier to do comaprisons, find bugs, figure out optimizations, etc.) that ran some code faster than running the binary natively. It performaed much better compared to native execution when the native binary was compiled with fewer optimizations.
Thier technology certainly is an elegant solution to deaing with ISAs, particlarly ones that have such high decoding overhead. I wish they also exposed an instruction set that was lower overhead for thier code morphing engine. Maybe something like RTL (HP calculator libraries are compiled to a RTL for portability) or a memory machine ("infinate" registers) like the DIS virtual machine from Bell Labs.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
most people dont use a laptop as a portable supercomputer
This is changing. Only tradition and price enforce the box+CRT+peripherals paradigm. The market has already proven very receptive to friendlier form-factors like the iMac and Shuttle PCs.
High-powered "desktop replacement" laptops have been a rapidly growing market lately. Many companies will give you a laptop or a desktop as your main machine, but not both. Many colleges require you to own a computer but even those schools are increasingly requiring that computer to be a laptop.
Hmm. And I seem to remember various news blurbs about laptop sales growing faster than desktop sales.
Anyway, I'll never use a laptop since the ergonomics are so bad. But outside of that, it's nonsense to say they can't replace desktops if you remember that this year's laptop is faster than last year's drool-over-the-floor power rig.
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Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
And what makes you sure that TMTA chips won't
support all that Palladium stuff?
I worked for a company that evaluated the crusoe for use in their servers and had to take a pass. The reason it was so interesting is that to build very dense (i.e. small footprint, lots of power) servers, heat becomes the single largest issue. We were building servers that would service telephone company needs around speech recognition, so that you could pick up a phone and say what you wanted instead of dialing. Alas, we couldn't pick the crusoe because it didn't support SSE2, which is not required for speech recognition, but increases the speed of it soo much that you dont need nearly as much CPU horsepower. In the end we went with Intel PIII's because the CPU Mips to heat/power was the right balance.
The people of slash dot need to think beyond their desktop's sometimes and think about how a system will be used by users of servers, and not desktop's. I was really looking forward to the release of this chip, until they decided not to support the SSE2.
Oh well...
It is not enough to not know what I don't, but better to always to know what I do.