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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 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
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?
MSK