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

Marketing

[mjmalone]

From the article:

Transmeta is the "number two" vendor in the ultraportable mainstream notebook market

Is that why nobody knows about them? Maybe they should focus some attention on advertising, I don't think many people outside the tech industry knows about Transmeta. Intel spends a rediculous amount of money on product marketing, and when many people get a new computer they want "Intel Inside" because it's what they know. I think if any competitor really wants to break into the chip industry and compete with the big boys they are going to have to get their name out, the real differences between one chip versus another are not very obvious to the consumer, brand recognition is what drives sales.

Re:Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why VIA is becoming more and more popular. If you think "ultra-small sized PCs" you have to think mini-ITX, and VIA EPIA.

This is what I think (may be biased by publicity, but that's exactly my point) :
Intel = reliable, industry standard (never had any Intel die, even since the 8086 days)
AMD = power, speed, will burn without good heat dissipation (had two AMDs die on me, installed professionally. Will never buy AMD again)
VIA = low-heat, small size (currently two projets using EPIA boards)

Re:Marketing

[TheViffer]

And 640K is enough for anyone ...

I completly disagree with your posts.

First low power consumption is become more and more and issue. Electricity is not cheap, and with more and more computers in organizations, they are looking for ways to cut down on the electricity bill.

This is two fold because with lower power consumption means less heat. Walla .. save MORE electricity by not running huge, or as many air conditioning units.

This even falls back to home use. 10 years ago running your own home server was a "pipe dream" and not needed. Now just about every slashdot reader has some sort of server(s) running. I myself only run a Duron 1000 due to is low power consumption and cooler temperatures. For serving up files and a few dns, web hits is more then enough. After switch DOWN from a Palamino cored Athlon to this, I saw my monthly electric usage decline.

And your mention of not needing to market is just wrong. They should be out there stating ...

We run cooler ..
We run cheaper ..

And add in a few plugs .. We run faster, better, cheaper, blah blah blah. Go to the extent of showing a picture of an Athlon frying an egg on one picture and a piece of ice sitting on a Trasmetta CPU. And by marketing their name, people come to know it, and trust it more, which mean people will be more interested in products with their chips, which mean more companies will seek out Transmetta chips which mean more revenue.

Why does BASF advertise .. "We dont make 'jack', we just make 'jack' better"

My 0010 cents worth.

Re:whats the big deal

[Nerant]

Transmeta chips are essentially a VLIW CPU, surrounded by a sophisticated JIT compiler that translates and compiles x86 code to the native instruction set of the VLIW CPU, and then runs the code.
This allows Transmeta to save on die space. Smaller die = less transistors = less heat = less power.
Unfortunately, this approach so far has yielded substandard performance. And even though power consumption was better than Intel's mobile processors for awhile, Intel quickly geared up, threw money and engineers at the problem, and came out with the Pentium M.
Arstechnica.com has speculated before that Transmeta could easily use the same approach to optimise for speed/performance as opposed to power consumption : I'm hoping they do.