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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? :)
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
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.
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.
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?
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.
Or, build your own Intel- or AMD-based computer that's cheaper, faster, and uses less power.
Not according to the guys who know what they're talking about.
Your AMD or Intel machine will not get anything close to the mips/watt ratio that the Transmeta does. The LANL people go on to conclude that the Transmeta is cheaper in the long run as well, because of power (including cooling) and space savings. Faster, I'll grant you, but one out of three is pretty poor batting, certainly not worth a moderation of 5.
For a cluster, the faster argument goes out the window as well, because the performance equation comes down to mips/watt, mips/cubic foot and mips/$$$, in all of which Transmeta leads AMD and Intel.
Now I don't know about you, but I find the monolithic, nuclear reactor core kind of box is getting less and less interesting as time goes by, and what I really want is a box full of much more efficient processors, all dirt-cheap of course. I'll admit that that there's no way for the typical home user to get into this kind of system for a price that competes with a single, Athlon or P4, but that's this year. Check again next year.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?