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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."

31 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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    1. Re:One of these days... by kfg · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No, it isn't. Particularly for systems intended for basic use, such as, say, running vi and mutt, with the odd Nethack session thrown in, or even Win98 with basic productivity software.

      VIA chips are also a viable solution for these systems, and my next desktop system, literally, I'm going to be building it directly into the desktop itself, will probably rely on one of these low heat, low power consumption, chips.

      First figure out how much "power" you need, then get the chip that requires the least power for the least money. It's both the proper financial *and* engineering solution.

      KFG

    2. Re:One of these days... by thesupraman · · Score: 2, Informative

      In which case, why do you state that you would use either an Athlon XP or a Transmeta chip? these are the exact opposites in the speed per power curve!

      It sounds to me much more like an 'anything but intel' approach - fine, but at least admit it.

      If you want a low power consumption (and quiet) desktop solution now, look into the VIA C3 series, not fast but very low power.

      If you want a high power but fast solution, look at Intel or AMD, they rule the desktop one way or another.

      I personally would like to see these new transmeta chips available in small embedded boards where their low heat production and high level of integration would be of great value, much like the C3 boards current are, but another step up, smaller and with lower power usage.

    3. Re:One of these days... by Elwood+P+Dowd · · Score: 4, Funny

      My next system will be either an Athlon XP or a Crusoe/Astro.

      My next car will either be an RX8 or a Prius.

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    4. Re:One of these days... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      1) Create cool (literally) CPU.

      Most of the time I just use a browser, email client and xmms. I also ssh into school to run Mathematica. I don't need a CPU capable of frying eggs thank you very much. An Astro desktop system would be perfect for me.

      2) Refuse to sell to someone wanting to build their own desktop system based on your CPU.

      I just wan't a CPU and mobo damn it. Why is this so hard to understand. I already have all the other components. I'd be willing to pay $400 for the privilege of having no fans. For the love of god please take my money.

      Hmm, mabey they are having problems fabbing enough chips?

      3) Fire more employees

      I don't understand why they are ignoring the silent desktop market. Check out www.silentpcreview.com and www.hushterchnologies.net The market is there and it is growing. How much would you pay to get rid of the noise your computer makes?

      4) Profit!!!

  2. 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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  3. It slices it dices by bigmase521 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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  4. Originally... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...the name of the Astro was "Tralfaz." OK, OK, it's a really obscure reference.

  5. Re:Not to be a naysayer.. by evanbd · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

  6. 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 silvaran · · Score: 2, Interesting

      My understanding was the code morphing technology would convert IA code to the native transmeta chip's code, a bit like microinstructions. So it doesn't necessarily support any other architecture. But I could be wrong... nss

    2. Re:What ever happened the to the code morphing? by Elwood+P+Dowd · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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    3. 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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    4. 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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    5. Re:What ever happened the to the code morphing? by vlad_petric · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.

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      The Raven

    6. Re:What ever happened the to the code morphing? by mmol_6453 · · Score: 2, Informative

      PPC vs x86 IA has nothing to do with VLIW.

      VLIW improves performance when the instruction stream can be split up over multiple processing units.

      Exhibit A:

      LOAD A
      LOAD B
      LOAD C
      LOAD D
      ADD A, B
      MOD A, C
      ADD A, D
      STORE A

      LOAD E
      LOAD F
      LOAD G
      LOAD H
      ADD E, F
      MOD E, G
      ADD E, H
      STORE E

      Exhibit B:

      LOAD A
      LOAD B
      LOAD C
      LOAD D
      LOAD E
      LOAD F
      LOAD G
      LOAD H
      ADD A, B
      ADD E, F
      MOD A, C
      MOD E, G
      ADD A, D
      ADD E, H
      STORE A
      STORE E

      Exhibit A is more difficult to make parallel than exhibit B, since the potentially parallelable code is separated, and, from a CPU's short-range perspective, each operation in exhibit A depends on the previous, which makes executing the instructions in parallel impossible.

      In exhibit B, instructions independent of each other are right next to each other. This makes it easy for the CPU to separate the code into parallel units.

      I'm no expert, I just read a lot of Ars Technica.

      (As an aside...they have an article that may change your views about x86(ala P4) vs PPC(ala G4e). It doesn't take one side or another, it just points out the different approaches used by each architecture.)

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  7. Compiler enhancements? by mmol_6453 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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?

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  8. Re:Not to be a naysayer.. by arose · · Score: 2, Informative

    Ever heard about Matrox?

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  9. 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.

  10. Re:Not to be a naysayer.. by fadeaway · · Score: 2, Informative

    As far as I know, Matrox primarily deals in business cards designed for enhancing 2D display (text, image editing, etc). I was referring to gaming cards.

  11. Transmeta vs. ARM by yawnmoth · · Score: 3, Informative
    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

  12. 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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  13. Re:Not to be a naysayer.. by fadeaway · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hey, no one ever said that he with the most ingenuity wins. We're dealing with what already is a cut-throat market. There's currently two competitors, one survives because half of the market doesn't trust the other. The other survives only by reducing costs by sacrificing stability and quality.

    Where does Transmeta fit in? That tiny demographic that's willing to pay the extra cash for lower voltage and longer battery life? How long do you think they'll honestly survive serving a nich market..? Unless they can secure a serious foothold in the market by achieving Intels brand recognition, or matching AMD's prices, they're as good as gone.

  14. Re:Why aren't these more popular? by tjhanley · · Score: 3, Funny

    what???? i can't hear you...

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  15. Where's a feature comparison? by Hanno · · Score: 3, Informative

    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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  16. Re:no, really, i need one by chill · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I saw this but considered the following...

    It is so thin and light because it doesn't have any drives -- no CD/DVD and no floppy. Fine, but if I want to do that, I'll get that Lindows laptop that has about the same specs (Via C3 processor @ 933 MHz) for 1/2 the price ($799 vs $1,499)

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  17. Order by price/power/performance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  18. Re:Silent is good by torndorff · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  19. 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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  20. 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.