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Build Your Own Crusoe-Powered Computer
jonmason00 writes "Just checked the Transmeta webpage, and discovered that they are now offering a Crusoe TM5800 System Development Kit. It's a bit expensive ($995) and you gotta register before you can buy one, but they need your support." How about an Astro development kit instead? :)
Transmeta is a fucking business for God's sake, not Greenpeace.
They came up with a crappy business plan at the wrong time, and natural selection is taking care of it. Why try screwing the process up?
Sorry, this might be an unpopular view because Linus works there, and all, but no company needs my support if they've got a product I find useful for a price that is competitive with other companies, and I won't waste my money supporting someone else's unsucessful ideas, just because they've got cool technology or cool employees.
...they need your support...
.. Geek corporate welfare.
Great
Or, build your own Intel- or AMD-based computer that's cheaper, faster, and uses less power.
Transmeta had a great goal when they started four years ago to reduce power use in their chips and allow for code-morphing, but it's now 2002 and mobile Intel and AMD chips are faster and use less power. And don't even get started on desktop CPU comparison...
Intel and AMD have both signed on to Microsoft's Palladium program. We need a chip maker who hasn't succumbed to this yet.
A crappy marketing strategy is no reason to write off an innovative technology [and yes, for once I believe the word is used rightly here.] The lower power consumption specs don't hurt either.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
And, just for the record, this product isn't one I will be buying. It is way overpriced for what you are getting. A comparable barebones motherboard + CPU based on Intel or AMD could be had for an order of magnitude less money without requiring any kind of signup deal.
It's not our responsibility to keep the company afloat. I'm all about supporting software projects that obviously serve the open source movement, but a business faces risks when playing in the processor arena. I am happy to pay money for projects like the free blender foundation. Transmeta is responsible for getting their processors put into retail products, we are not responsible for donations.
Sir Timbly of Cannatuna, offical Knight of the Heptagonal Table
They need our support, guys, let's rack up huge bandwidth bills and see if we can set their web server on fire!
Nothing like a good ol' slashdotting to bring a business back in the black.
I bet even the mobile versions of the aforementioned processors are cheaper and faster.
--sdem
What's with this "you gotta register"?
Why can't businesses be content with getting my money?
Oh, because they're not selling commodities anymore, they're turning their customers into commodities to be sold.
Shall I supply my blood type and a DNA sample and a piss test and fingerprints in addition to my social security number and home phone and mother's maiden name?'
Get out of my life! Sell me your product and go away! I am not a number, and I don't need to be in your database!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
or you could just use via's mini-itx multimedia platform for around $100 (board, cpu, network, sound & video).
mini-itx.com
Listen, I love Transmeta because they had some cool ideas when they started out. And hey, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, works there as well. So their geek factor is really high and they seem like nice people as well (I visited back in 2000).
I was just let-go by my company last Friday after 10 years of service. Bills are lying around waiting to be paid and I'm trying to send out resumes and find some work before my wife and kid leave me. I love them to death and would probably "end it all" if I lost them.
So why should I spend my meager (non-existant, now) salary to support a company? They're in a business, and the business of business involves profiting.
If you can't profit, you lose the business. So Transmeta, enough with this puppy-eyed cutesy appeal to the geek masses for financial support. Many of us are unemployed as it is and risking losing our lives from insanity.
Yeah, it's stupid to say that a for-profit company needs our support, but this thing is not meant to be your next desktop machine. Transmeta knows you can get a barebones x86 box for much less with far greater performance--they're not as stupid as many of you would like to believe. They're selling a development kit, i.e. for someone wanting to prototype, say, a stereo component or set-top box for resale.
We in the Java world were creaming all over ourselves at this prospect.
Why didn't they persue the embedded device executing bytecode natively path?
I can see the attraction for a kit like this. For those of us who might want to put together some type of home theatre pc or car pc something _like_ this would be nice. With the low power/heat requirements, it would lend itself nicely to such uses. IF it were a lot smaller. It's just too big. Plus they are just competing with all the other microatx mb's out there. This is the feature set that I think would actually be attractive:
- make it much smaller, all small as feasable, don't worry about making it a "standard" size
- chuck the floppy/parallel, keep one serial for programming
- add 2 firewire ports for camcorders/ipods
- sell a 12v converter for car/boat apps
- allow the sound/video to be upgradable somehow (logic on sodimm?) to allow upgrading.
- of course, drop the price.
If they had done these things, then I would be most interested since I have several projects that are begging for a formfactor smaller than microatx, but yet doesn't force me to use crap audio/video.
Hell if you're going to go for a niche, then GO FOR THE NICHE, don't come out with a "me too" product that has very little to distinguish itself from the competition.
If you want a small, low power platform, look at the latest from Via, which contains 933 MHz processor (C3), USB2, audio, video, TV, ethernet, 1x PCI, in a 17cmx17cm form-factor for $160 from Fry's.
It definatly blows away that transmeta one: giving more functionality for a fraction of the cost. You can even get slower (~600 MHz) versions which are totally fanless.
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Additionally, if you're looking for higher end right now, choose one of the many mini-itx configurations available. http://www.mini-itx.com is a wonderful site based in the UK. Buy directly from them or use one of the vendors they recommend.
Sorry Linus , but people developing for tiny platforms can't afford to spend an extra $400-$500 for a Transmeta solution.
http://www.savetransmeta.com
:P
http://www.savelinus.com
http://www.helpcrusoesail.com
Yesh. I think that charging $995 might be just a wee bit more tolerable.
Hrm. Maybe we can get savekaryn.com to redirect funds to Transmeta. Hmm
What would really be cool is if they had a kit that allowed one to right their own "code morphing" code on top of their vliw core. I'm sure someone is/has work/ed/ing on a jvm for it. But imagine a linux kernel on core. I know that stuff like this has been tried before and failed miserably, but hey, that's what stuff like OS is about, just doing and making it work, and saying "now isn't that cool".
Or you could even come up with your own custom extensions to the x86 IS, implement game logic, whatever.
If there is any other user group that will try to squeeze each and every cycle out of an old 286 then I don't know of them.
Transmeta's chips run cool. Not a big deal to many people who grew up on vacuum cleaners inside their computers, but many Mac aficionados know how much having a very quiet computer can mean.
There's a lot of applications that just don't *need* a ton of CPU time, but longevity and the ability to not have failure-prone and noisy fans in a device is worthwhile.
I don't see why this is so bad. If I get a laptop in the near future (think I finally settled on a new desktop instead this year), it's going to be a Lifebook. Why? The things *get* a ton of battery life (17 hrs spec, 10 hrs under load).
May we never see th
I think most of you guys missed the point. This is not so much for you to build your home entertainment PC, or the next killer desktop machine. Quite rightly, an Intel/AMD/Via solution would be much more cost effective.
This is here really for smaller manufacturers to have accesses to the technology needed to build their prototypes etc. You prototype your next device using these parts, and when ready to go mass market, you can strike a deal for the CPU's etc. at bulk or whatever.
This is just a developer kit, it isnt supposed to be really cheap/competitive etc. The value stuff comes when you are buying in bulk later.
Performance is another thing, but one million cycles per second is the same thing in every friggin supercluster. Sorry to burst your bubble of different MHz measurements, but I guess truth always hertz.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Similar to the way that an Athlon 1600+ is faster than an older 1600mhz Tbird, the VIA C3 processors are nowhere near as fast as equivalently clocked Pentiums or Athlons. I'm highly skeptical that a 900mhz C3 is close to the performance of a 900mhz Crusoe, which by most accounts performs as you would expect a near-1ghz processor to do.
But man, Transmeta has totally missed the boat by not making basic, affordable computers available to hobbyists. FlexATX and C3-driven Mini-ITX boards are enjoying the kind of hobbyist popularity that helped put AMD on the map a few years ago. This $1000 "developer board" is too little, too late, and too much freakin' $$$!
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
Sort of OT; but why isn't the EPIA series, especially the 6000 model with 800MHz C3 not gaining more attention? It runs fanless, has TV-out on the board, can take 1GB of ram and has everything you could need on the board, throw it into
one of these which happens to have an external PS and a front USB port and was pretty much designed with the EPIA 6000 in mind. I've harped on it before, but why isn't this the preferred RYO PVR platform?
The form factor fits right in with your vcr, and the case comes with a pci-riser card to fit that AMD AWIP card for TV-in, and excellent 3D. Nearly silent and the price is right (the Mobo/Case costs around $195). You could make a fantastic PVR/PC-compatible-gaming-consolesque system for around $500. $195 +$100(AIW) +$75(80GB eide hdd) +$60(1GB pc133 ram) +70(DVD/CD-RW comb0 drive). Add it up. And that's a lot of overkill on the ram, but hey, it's cheap. So why isn't this a story? Because it's not coming from Intel, AMD, or Transmeta? All of this "digital convergeance" is leading to more and more embedded arenas, if we can make a box like that at retail prices, think of what we could prototype for our own foray into the embedded market...
put the what in the where?
AMD and Intel are pushing for integrated DRM in all systems. Using Transmetta products might be a way of avoiding that - if enough people boycott AMD and Intel and are vocal about their reasons we might be able to get compulsory DRM at bay.
However I did notice that they use an ATI video card. Bad move if you're wanting to use that under Linux. Their video cards are all tied up in patents. I have been trying for 18 months to get an answer on why ATI asked people to cease development of TV-out support on my Radeon. That was one of the reasons I bought it, and it WAS supported and worked well at the time. Now however it only works with 18-month old drivers that don't really sit well with X. Damned ATI. Oh and Damned nVidia also. Their driver lock my system every 20 mins without fail - the other reason I chose to buy a Radeon. Maybe I should just redirect my console to my canon bubblejet...
I think you meant "deification." The dietization of Linus might be a good idea--he looks like he could stand to lose a couple of pounds.
Yes, Ditzel would want to show Transmeta as pandering to the Windows market - after all, how can a HW manufacturer stay in business if it doesn't?
But remember: there will be a fast-growing market for non-DRMed CPUs. If Transmeta play their cards right [get better marketing and business managers, dammit!], they can show the PHBs of the world why it is a bad idea to invest in hardware that they do not have full control over.
Thanks for the informative post.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Sure, I know they're a business. But they're going out of their way to support linux and that's something I'm not ashamed to support. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours as they say.
$ host -t NS kernel.orgkernel.org name server ns2.transmeta.com
kernel.org name server zenii.linux.org.uk
kernel.org name server ns.vger.kernel.org
kernel.org name server ns1.kernel.org
kernel.org name server ns1.transmeta.com
kernel.org name server ns2.kernel.org
Multiple clocking. Some chips are clocked to rising edge, some to falling edge, and some to both. Clocking to both doubles the EFFECTIVE clock speed.
Differently specced clocks. The AMD Elan I'm working with now can use either 33.000MHz or 33.333MHz as its base clock chip, leading to slight variations in the final frequency, but that's rounding error.
Split clock, anyone? Horrible to work with if you've done any LSI or VLSI, but running the chip on multiple multiples/divisors of the base clock is actually relatively common.
Finally, asynchronous designs, lol, although neither of the systems mentioned are asynchronous. Clockspeed is no longer a true concept anymore.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
The more I read about the Crusoe chips, the more I start to think about how they should just drop the strict x86 compat, and start people developing directly for the core of the chip, in it's native tongue.
... make the Crusoe a 64 bit chip, and codemorph SPARC or MIPS.
The Crusoe is a chip that runs comparable to a similar Intel/AMD chip and yet does it all through software emulation. Imagine what it can do with it's straight instruction set! Developers could start programming applications that take advantage of this, but then if they required a backward compatible app that has been compiled for x86, then the chip could also run those too. A distro based on the "native" Crusoe instruction set, could run x86 compiled applications.
Why stop there? If they are able to codemorph x86, why not PPC or
Your mom always said, a PB&J is better than nothing, and God is nothing, is a PB&J better than God?
... if they want my support. I'd love to build a machine that uses less power and doesn't need a CPU fan; it'd be good for a router or a file server for my humble home office. I would use a Transmeta CPU in a heartbeat if it were available and relatively inexpensive. VIA actually offers some similar products; I used a CPU from their C3 line that advertises that it doesn't need a fan, but it isn't nearly as nifty as Transmeta's stuff. Anyway, why doesn't Transmeta start talks with competing motherboard manufacturers?
I doubt the Eden platform is actually lower power than the Crusoe platform. Running fanless simply means that the processor has a low power dissipation - that is, W/mm^2 - power per area. It doesn't necessarily mean that it actually uses low power.
That, and the Crusoe devkit is basically designed for a laptop. You can't buy a charge controller/keyboard/touchpad interface for the Eden platform.
Not to mention the fact that you get schematics, as well. For $995. That's cheap.
But for $160, including processor, the EPIA-M is an amazing deal, and it's fast enough for most day-to-day uses. Dollar for dollar, it's by far the best deal around. Those things should be in every school and business as workstations and desktop machines.
128K L1, 64K L2 (victim cache I assume). It's, architecture wise, roughly between a Pentium and PPro (and 2 and III) core, so roughly, a 933 MHz C3 would be about a 400 MHz Intel PIII. Not great, but fast enough for most tasks. The latest Epia board does have an MPEG2 decoder in hardware, so you can do full-rate DVD decoding.
Note that the C3's peak power is the same roughly as Transmeta (5.5 W), at a fraction of the cost (the die on the C3 is 53 mm^2 and it is PIII compatable chipset-wise), and considering how poorly Transmeta performs (notice Transmeta is very lax on giving benchmarks, and are really sensitive to caching on the instruction stream), Via pretty much has em beat.
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