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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. One of these days... by intermodal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    it will be feasable to build a home system with a transmeta chip without it being a pain in the ass to find or get ahold of one. My next system will be either an Athlon XP or a Crusoe/Astro. Which it will be will depend on a lot of things, but if its a pain in the ass to get, I'll just end up with the AMD.

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  2. What ever happened the to the code morphing? by HomerJ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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. Making it maybe possible to do things like dualboot MacOSX and WindowsXP. They just decided to say the heck with all of that, and use it all to make low power x86 cpus(that don't look like they are selling too well based on the number of products using them)

    So where's my triple boot OSX/XP/Linux box running on a transmeta chip?

    1. Re:What ever happened the to the code morphing? by dhovis · · Score: 4, Interesting
      You are wrong.

      The idea of the code morphing is that any ISA could emulated. x86 is the only emulation that they focus on, but it should be able to emulate PPC, Alpha, MIPS, Z-80, you name it.

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  3. Re:Not to be a naysayer.. by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    but I have little faith in any third party entries in the CPU market at this point. Much like vid-cards, I the market only has enough room for a two horse race.

    (That's insightful? C'mon now.)

    Transmeta is going off in a different direction. Intel and AMD have gotten to be about trading massive power consumption for incremental performance increases. Now Intel is backpedalling because you just can't stick a high end P4 in a laptop (hence the Centrino). Transmeta is putting power consumption first, which is a different angle.

  4. Re:Not to be a naysayer.. by 4of12 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Transmeta is putting power consumption first, which is a different angle.

    People often speak of CPU power consumption in the same breath as laptops and it's certainly important.

    Despite the troubles of RLX and related companies (probably due to the general market downturn more than their specific product), the server market for low power chips will come back.

    At some point we'll probably see benchmarks on TPC/kW or Webstones/rack where Transmeta could make a dent.

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