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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."

11 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 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.

      --

      There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
  2. 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.

  3. 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 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.

      --

      There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
    2. 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.

      --

      --
      The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.

    3. 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

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

    --
    "Provided by the management for your protection."
  6. 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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  7. 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.