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Transmeta Astro -- More Details

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the smallness dept.

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."

5 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. More competition for processor production by yozzle · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The more processors we have competing, the more Intel and AMD will push ahead in their research to make even faster (and hopefully cooler) processors. Transmeta's upcoming release of the Astro processor will provide this competition for them. I hope we can see improvement in the field of PC processors.

    1. Re:More competition for processor production by Hanno · · Score: 4, Insightful

      make even faster (and hopefully cooler) processors

      Decide. You can only have one at a time.

      They either give you faster CPUs or cooler CPUs.

      First, they go for faster for the price of creating way more heat. Those were the last few years.

      Right now, the market has decided that it doesn't need any more speed and that it is more concerned about heat and energy consumption. Alas, not for enviromental reasons, since then we'd see low voltage CPUs and chipsets in desktops, but because it affects laptop battery life and it's potentially unpleasant.

      I hope that low voltage CPUs will be seen more often in desktops. I hate my computer's cooling fans.

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  2. Re:What ever happened the to the code morphing? by addaon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Dude, get your facts straight. (a) transmeta chips are VLIW, not RISC. (b) the processor uses a 256-bit instruction path, but uses a mixture of 32 bit and 64 bit internal registers. This revision may include some 128 bit internal registers. Regardless, it can access 2^35 bits of memory, not even the 2^39 that intel chips can address...

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  3. Performance boost by mmol_6453 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you have a lot of ram, one way to improve compile time is to move all the code off the (slow) harddrive and onto the (fast) ramdisk. (Debian defines /tmp as a ramfs drive...dunno about other distributions.)

    Works for me. :) (But then, I just placed my second order for 768MB of PC133 SDRAM...So I'm a bit behind the times.)

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  4. Re:Not to be a naysayer.. by Henry+Stern · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Serving a rich market has worked fine for Apple for years. A good way to boost your profit margins is to simply sell a superior, more expensive product.

    My Compaq Presario 12XL423 is a piece of garbage. Not a day goes by that I don't kick myself for not spending a few hundred more on a better laptop.