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."

Comments

Trademark, not copyright

[_fuzz_]

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

Re:whats the big deal

[Erich]

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!