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New Transmeta Chip: "Efficeon"
ddtstudio writes "Oh, "Astro" was such a friendly name -- but it probably had trademark issues. So the alphabet blender came up with "Efficeon" instead. This eWeek story gives the lowdown on what Transmeta is doing apres Linus. There's also a writeup on ExtremeTech."
You can't copyright a name, but you can trademark it.
47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
They did when Linus was there and it ran *slower* because the VLIW instruction set could not exploit enough parallelism at compile-time. Itanium also has the same problems.
> Oh, "Astro" was such a friendly name -- but it
> probably had copyright issues.
Please. Get it straight. Trademark, not copyright.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
According to a this article , "Efficeon" was chosen because the former name violated the trademarks of an animation company, Hanna-Barbara. Strange, because these are unrelated products.
Instead of doing this translation in hardware, Transmeta does this in software, and it enables a lot of optimization while (at the same time) vastly reducing the amount of hardware resources required to do wide, out-of-order execution.
They get varied results -- some things go much, much faster on the Transmeta, but it's very bad at doing other things (especially things like self-modifying code).
The internal architecture is also very geared towards translation and running translated code. There are features that allow it to run a bunch of code in a translation that is fast, but not safe. If there is a problem with this unsafe translation (memory exception or something) the execution can be rewinded (rewound?) into a known-good state and a slower translation or interpretation can be used.
Transmeta has released some good papers on this whole thing. If you're interested in this kind of thing, you might want to also check out HP's Dynamo and Intel's DAISY.
Yay, clever computer architecture!
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Well, it might be based on the PIII and has adopted some parts of the P4. But it has some more radical changes.
It has more in common with Transmeta than one might think. It features Micro-Op Fusion (TM)(R)(C). After translating the Ops into muOps they are reassembled to, how do they call them? Not-LIW, no.., ah.. Macro-instruction, which can be executed more efficiently.
But why should I smatter. Use the source Luke.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
I don't know about that. They are promising only 50-80% improvements over their old Crusoe 5800 processor. That would put them as being about on-par with the chips that Intel had out two years ago when the Crusoe 5800 was first available, but it'll have a hell of a time competing with the chips that Intel is producing now, let alone 6+ months from now when this new Transmeta processor actually starts shipping.
I think that the real question will be how well this chip can compete with Intel's Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) Mobile Celeron line of processors. The two chips will have comperable power consumption (5-10W max, typical of under 5W) and probably won't be too far off one another in terms of price. Previous Transmeta chips have had a heck of a time keeping up with even the slowest mobile Celeron chips that Intel had available (read: they kind of kept up in MS Office, but got pretty well thrashed for everything else), but maybe this newer chip will bring performance up a bit.
Weird things you find on Google:
Duron = durare (Latin) "to last" + -on "unit"
Opteron = optimus (Latin) "best" + -on "unit"
Athlon = athlon (Greek) "prize"
Celeron = celere (Latin) "quick" + -on "unit"
Radion = "radiare" (Latin) "to emit light" + -on "unit"
Pentium = pente (Greek) "five" + (marketspeak?)
I'm guessing about Efficeon.. but:
Efficeon = "efficiens" (Latin) "to produce"? + -on "unit"
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.