Transmeta Astro -- More Details

chill writes "We've recently seen announcements, product launches and reviews from AMD and Intel on their new low power chipsets. Not to be left out, Transmeta has more details on their forthcoming Astro processor. Slashdot covered the Astro back at Comdex in November."

Comments

Re:Not to be a naysayer..

[evanbd]

That's interesting; I rather like my transmeta-powered laptop. Especially the way it uses a whole 7 watts of power for the entire thing (that's a mostly idle state... editors and web browsers open, but not doing ahuge amount). It's lightweight and fast enough, but more speed is always welcome. As is lower power, which I think the new chip is...

Seems to me the Transmeta chips work fine.

For reference, I'm using a Toshiba Libretto L1, purchased from Dynamism.com.

Transmeta vs. ARM

[yawnmoth]

for those of ya'll who are currious how transmeta's line of processors compares to ARM based processors, here's an interesting page which sorta demonstrates that:

http://www.duke.edu/~kaf3/lowpower/slide28.html

Re:What ever happened the to the code morphing?

[Elwood P Dowd]

I remember way back before they released anything, their major claim to fame so to speak was their code morphing tech where it would just emulate whatever cpu you needed.

No, their claim to fame was that their code morphing allowed them to run x86 instructions on a VLIW chip, which may turn out to be more scalable/efficient than either RISC or CISC architectures. The R&D on the code morphing was just as expensive as the R&D for the rest of the chip, so I can't imagine they'd go repeating that for some less popular architecture.

They never said they were about to release code morphing packages for other platforms. Idiotic journalists (and slashdot readers) were the ones that pointed out that the code morphing could work for other platforms.

Where's a feature comparison?

[Hanno]

I'm a bit puzzled about the good and bad things of the various low power x86 CPU series. So far, I have identified at least five different:

- Transmeta Crusoe
- Via C3
- Intel ULV (old, now outdated by the new Centrino)
- Intel Pentium-M (aka Centrino, which appears to be a chipset strategy as well)
- AMD XP-M (aka Low Voltage Thoroughbred)

So, please tell me, why should I choose over the other? Where are the conceptual differences?

Order by price/power/performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Fastest to slowest:
AMD XP-M
Intel Pentium-M
Intel ULV Pentium III
Via C3
Transmeta Crusoe

Least power to most power:
Transmeta Crusoe
Intel Pentium-M
Via C3
Intel ULV Pentium III
AMD XP-M

Cheapest to most expensive:
Via C3
Transmeta Crusoe
Intel ULV Pentium III
AMD XP-M
Pentium-M

It depends on your need; if you are going for embedded systems try a non-x86 processor, which is better in all two categories and in the middle in performance. For a laptop, the XP-M or Pentium-M offers desktop replacement performance; if battery life is your thing, the Pentium-M, Via C3 or Transmeta processors ought to do ok. If cheap is the most important thing then go Via.

Re:What ever happened the to the code morphing?

[vlad_petric]

NO.

The processor is not RISC, it's VLIW. A meta-instruction is made of 8 smaller, 32-bit ones. The key characteristic of VLIW is that these 8 instructions are explicitly parallel; the processor knows, when processing this instruction, that it can execute all these 8 subinstructions in parallel (now a sub-instruction is RISC-like, I grant you that). The difficulty is finding this level of parallelism in existing x86 programs (this is the job of the software code morpher)

Furthermore, only the meta-instruction is 256 bits, not the registers, etc (which are only 32 bits). That'd be way too wasteful. Most apps don't need more than 32 bits, anyway. Only big servers need more than 4 Gigs; this processor is targeted to mobile applications, therefore I'm pretty sure it can only address 4 G of RAM.