New Transmeta Chip: "Efficeon"

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New Transmeta Chip: "Efficeon"

Posted by michael on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @05:32AM from the let-the-jokes-begin dept.

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."

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Trademark, not copyright by _fuzz_ · 2003-08-12 05:42 · Score: 5, Informative

You can't copyright a name, but you can trademark it.

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Re:whats the big deal by Erich · 2003-08-12 06:45 · Score: 5, Informative

Really? Interesting. I would figure it could never be as fast as native x86, it's all still emulation.
"Native x86" really doesn't exist. Since the AMD K5 and Intel Pentium Pro, x86 instructions are translated into smaller, RISC-like instructions inside the processor.
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!

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-- Erich
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Re:Performance over name by Hoser+McMoose · 2003-08-12 08:00 · Score: 3, Informative

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.