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Transmeta Introduces The Efficeon
brentlaminack writes "Information Week and others are
reporting on Transmeta's new Efficeon chip. 1.1 GHz, 7 Watts, 1MB cache, 130 nanometer technology. A marked improvement over their previous generation. Let's hope they can capitalize on this before Intel starts filling the same niche. Looks like a nice product, Linus and Co." Update: 10/15 00:22 GMT by T :
woobieman29 writes "Looks like this is a good day for high-efficiency processors. Hot on the heels of Transmetas announcement of the Efficeon, VIA Technologies has announced the release of it's latest low-power processor, the NanoBGA EDEN-N. Capable of running at 533MHZ (4 watts), 800MHZ (6 watts), and 1GHZ (7 watts) this appears to be a very good fit for Thin Client and other embedded devices. One really interesting feature is the on-chip Padlock security suite incorporating AES encryption."
I hope it's faster than the current chips. I have a Compaq TabletPC with the current 1GHz Crusoe and while functional, it isn't that fast. The Pentium low power chips are faster. Even doing normal daily business tasks I couldn't see using one as my main PC.
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/669
Kirby
I once had a look at the giant Transmeta Cluster at Los Alamos called green destiny.
the most impressive thing about it is how small it is.
over 280 blades + disk server in a single rack.
then you realize its sitting in an uncooled ordinary room shared by people. its not putting out hardly any heat the building air cant keep up with. its plugged into a normal building power strip, and its not making much noise.
then you see the benchmarks. this thing runs faster than the equivalent pentium on scientific codes. How is this possible you wonder if its doing this code morphing. the answer is that the transmeta JIT code morph results in code that executes faster on the transmeta than the original pentium code. On scientific code with lots of long tight loops the overhead of the code morph goes away and it runs faster. (the opposite is true for GUI desktop apps where it is constantly jumping around and not spending time in small sections of code.).
finally they show you the uptime. forever. no dead units. (on our other pentium cluster form the same manufacturuere we replace as mauch as blade a day)
these things are way better price performance ratio than pentiums when you factor in the total lack of building infrastructure, and maintainence. low heat keeps them stable.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
see article.
Intel's ULV Pentium M chip runs at up to 1.0GHz and consumes 7W maximum. Their ULV Mobile Celeron also consumes only 7W when running at up to 800MHz. What's more, I haven't seen any info that says if the '7W' that Transmeta is quoting is it's maximum power consumption, a thermal design spec, or it's "typical" power consumption. Transmeta has a tendency to only talk about typical power consumption, while the 7W numbers listed above for Intel are the chips Thermal Design Power (TDP, basically the maximum you'll ever see with the exception of code specifically designed to consume maximum power). TDP is ALWAYS at least a few watts higher than 'typical' power consumption.
AMD may also have a low-voltage AthlonXP-M that is in the same power consumption range, but unfortunately AMD does a piss-poor job of documenting their mobile processors (read: there is absolutely no documentation publicly available). As you mentioned, VIA is also producing chips in the same power consumption range.
Long story short: Transmeta is going to have to either deliver on performance (like Intel does) or on price (like VIA). Right now they are talking about selling the chips for $100 a pop, which is quite a bit more than what VIA sells for. They are also talking about only a 50-80% improvement in performance over the Crusoe, which isn't going to do much for them in the way of performance. At 1.1GHz, they might be competitive with the 800MHz ULV Celeron, but I'm not holding my breath. The Crusoe had terrible performance.