Slashdot Mirror
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.
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]
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.
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.
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' $$$!
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
It's now, what, 4 years later and they still only have x86. Shame on you guys for lying to me like that!
I don't think they lied, it all has to do with reality. The reality is that the cpus have not sold in the quantities that they would have liked. In order to spend money on resources to come up with these other "personalities" you have to get the money from somewhere. I can't imagine that it would be cheap to develop such a thing and make it performant enough to justify the expense. Like the original poster of the article said, their hurting and it sure doesn't make any sense to pour money into supporting other chips that don't have nearly the market as the intel chips anyway. plus one of their claims to fame, low heat dissapation, isn't as big of a deal with the PPC since the chips run at lower clock rates and use less power in general anyway. Do cut them some slack, nice idea, just no money in it, sounds familiar.
Or, build your own Intel- or AMD-based computer that's cheaper, faster, and uses less power.
Not according to the guys who know what they're talking about.
Your AMD or Intel machine will not get anything close to the mips/watt ratio that the Transmeta does. The LANL people go on to conclude that the Transmeta is cheaper in the long run as well, because of power (including cooling) and space savings. Faster, I'll grant you, but one out of three is pretty poor batting, certainly not worth a moderation of 5.
For a cluster, the faster argument goes out the window as well, because the performance equation comes down to mips/watt, mips/cubic foot and mips/$$$, 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?