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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."
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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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.
Remember Cyrix? (shudder)
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.
but I wonder if it'll run Linux. If the performance is as good as thought to be, and the low-power consumption is really up to snuff, this chip could be in my new laptop. If Linus has any input, it's already Linux-ready. Let's just hope the rest of the freakin' hardware the OEM's use will be the same.
"I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin"
...the name of the Astro was "Tralfaz." OK, OK, it's a really obscure reference.
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?
Separately, Sharp is announcing it will use the exisiting TM5800 in one of the thinnest notebooks on the market.
hmmm, i wonder if i could get the boss to srping for one of these just so i could test it. [yup, after two month's intense scrutiny, i can tell you it runs games very well.]The details article mentions that a lot of the load the hardware normally does is being shunted back on the software. According to ArsTechnia, that's where it should be. (1, 2)
My question is, will compilers be able to bypass the code morphing software, and directly work with the Transmeta's underlying instruction set?
What's this Submit thingy do?
http://www.duke.edu/~kaf3/lowpower/slide28.html
Why is it you can buy an Intel or AMD chip at a thousand different sites, but hardly anyone sells these Transmeta chips. Seems like low power consumption leads to less noise, and I for one would love anything to make my system quieter.
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?
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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.
Transmeta also has another low-power processor in the works code named "Elroy". More details as they become available...
Disclaimer: I do have one of the systems I'm about to mention, but I would like to build one ;)
...)
VIA bought Cyrix a while ago; though maybe there's not *that* much difference between getting bought and going out of business (from the point of view of the company that got bought, outside of the folks who ended up getting bonuses because of it;)), and though this article (http://accelenation.com/?ac.id.141.1) says that VIA pretty much put the Cyrix part "to sleep," the market niche that Cyrix had with the MediaGX (and I did have a tiny notebook based on that chip once; it was slow, but it did OK), VIA has now more than competently filled with the various EPIA mini-ITX boards, now with speeds up to 1GHz. (Which sounds like small potatoes, esp. considering that on a clock-for-clock basis they're supposed to be considerably slower than other x86 chips from AMD and Intel, but they do draw little power, and that's a good tradeoff for some situations
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
the 5400 is only used in the fujitsu p1000--my main reason for not purchasing it. i really do love arm processors, and i do hope that the astro is successful performance wise, but this comparison is not helpful or thorough. the only available reviews of the astro are still from comdex, and these were qualitative. i do think that transmeta can create a market and be somewhat profitable. when was the last time that the most exciting stuff was not intel? now we have ppc 970's, amd 64's, transmeta astro's, mobile devices with arm's! the future is not wintel.
Actually I have a Transmeta Crusoe chip in my Sony Picturebook running FreeBSD 4.7-STABLE and it performs amazingly well (neglecting the very slow hdd's used by Sony). I installed using only a USB floppy drive (thanks my Mac friends) and everything else has been done via 16-bit PCMCIA network adapters.
;)
I believe everything compiles as regular ole x86 and the code-morphing is done at a very low software layer. If you'll read more about the Transmeta chips you'll see that several megabytes of memory are consumed on booting.
FreeBSD even has builtin sysctl settings for the LongRun processor/power management
Rock on FreeBSD.
Actually, many of them were trained by the U.S.
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.)
:) (But then, I just placed my second order for 768MB of PC133 SDRAM...So I'm a bit behind the times.)
Works for me.
What's this Submit thingy do?
It can be done, if you don't like fans in your computer, find a motherboard with a wide range of voltages. And do the oppisite of an overclock. Drop multipliers if your CPU is unlocked and drop the voltage. Less performace, but less heat. Perhaps even enough to get rid of all but a good heatsink.
Go google for more info. Sounds like a good idea tho. Personally this P4 with a 80mm fan is plenty quiet, not silet, but quiet.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Doesn't the -pipe option of gcc eliminate its use of /tmp? I've started using it, and compiling seems faster...
XScale technically isn't ARM. It is an old ARM implementation that was frozen in time when they sold it to Intel. ARM marches on in MIPS/watt in design wins. XScale only improves through process wins since Intel only owns an old implementation.
I know right where you can get one, although I'm not sure about the parts warranty:
/ category29500/index.html?from=R0
http://listings.ebay.com/pool2/plistings/list/all
Transmeta has licensed x86-64 from AMD. I don't think that it would be that big a deal to make the chip X86-64. It doesn't take that much transistors, and the performance-boost (thanks to those extra GP-registers) would be substantial when running 64bit-software. Also, X86-64 would get a nice boost by having more companies behind it.
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... in my desktop PC.
Transmeta is impossible, cause there are no boards available. VIA is too slow.
One way ist too underclock und undervolt your CPU. Some guys at www.silentpcreview.com have their Athlons running fanless(!) at 850 MHz and 1,1 Volt core voltage. The CPU doesn't consume more than 15 watts then.
I've done some experiments with Mobile Athlon in normal desktop boards. But not with that great results. Check out the forums of silentpcreview.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Anyone seen such figures compiled?
Who'd be a fish
I know, I know... I should google it, but... what kind of motherboard does the crusoe need? They offer you a reference design (Crusoe TM5800 System Development Kit), but I don't know of any other motherboard to run this proccessor.