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."

Comments

Let's change the name

[l810c]

Efficeon sounds kinda cheesy.

Here's some alternatives :

Ableon
Activeon
Adapteon
Apteon
Clevereon
Defteon
Efficaceon
Handeon
Potenteon
Powerfuleon
Shrewdeon
Tougheon

Re:Let's change the name

[MadCow42]

"Efficeon" (or "E" Model) came after the notoriously crappy "D" model: the Defficaceon.

Speed

[NetJunkie]

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.

Re:Linus at Transmetta?

[ComputerSlicer23]

I'm assuming your intentionally posting mis-information. Linus has never been willing to work for a Linux distributor. Right now, he is on a leave of absence from Transmeta, and working for the an industry consortium. The name escapes me at the moment. Ahh, a bit of googling turns up he left for OSDL (Open Source Development Lab?). He announced that on the Jun 17th of this year.

http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/669

Kirby

Green destiny

[goombah99]

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.

Linus didn't leave, he took leave of absence

[squashed]

see article.

Re:Names

[Troll_Kamikaze]

Why not simply name a product for what it is instead of spending all those dollars to come up with lame names?

Because somehow I don't think "Shitteon" or "Also-ron" would move many chips.

Slashdot editors are on crack (what else is new)

[illumin8]

Today we have two stories that about new processors that are about to be released. The Transmeta processor, while an incremental improvement, is nothing to really get excited about. The Clearspeed chip is simply vaporware.

Yet the one real story that is actually interesting "News for Nerds" was rejected by the Slashdot editors.

Sun Microsystems today announced it's roadmap for Throughput Computing. Remember how Sun has been talking about putting multiple cores on a single chip? Well, systems will be shipping in early 2004 that offer twice the performance of current top-of-the-line Ultrasparc IIIi chips. By late 2004, they will offer three times the performance. Coming in 2005, the second generation of this technology will offer 15 times the performance of current Ultrasparc IIIi technology. The roadmap extends to generation 3 (no date yet), which will offer 30 times the current performance.

This is way beyond Moore's Law and actually news that I want to read insightful Slashdot comments on.

With the anti-Sun bias the Slashdot editors show I guess I shouldn't be surprised...

[sarcasm]
Vaporware and anything having to do with Linus Torvalds' old employer are ever so more important than something that will radically change the computing landscape over the next few years.
[/sarcasm]

Linus & Co

[chabotc]

Small correction on "Looks like a nice product, Linus and Co". Linus has moved to OSDL, so for now it's just & Co.

Re:Slashdot editors are on crack (what else is new

[cmcguffin]

> The Clearspeed chip is simply vaporware.

> Coming in 2005, the second generation of [Sun's] technology will offer 15 times the performance of current Ultrasparc IIIi technology

According to Sun's press release, they will release hardware in "2005/2006" that is "expected" to increase throughput by 15 times for "Web, application serving, simple databases".

> Vaporware

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Is the cache pre or post code morph

[metalhed77]

I'm curious if anyone knows this (I know nothing about chips). But do transmeta processors use the cache to cache code before or after it has been code morphed? I saw the large cache and assumed that must be the reason as it would seem that increasing the amount of code that need not be recompiled would probably help out the transmeta chips quite a bit

Re:fp, yo

[toddestan]

I would think that a 1.1ghz CPU that uses 7W of power is newsworthy. It seems that VIA is the only x86 CPU maker out there that seems to make these kind of processors.

I have a hunch that in a few years people are going to become uninterested in faster computers to do things like office apps, email, and web browsing and instead will demand smaller, cheaper, and quieter computers. At that time Intel and AMD may find that many people are not interested in the Pentium VI Supa-Extreme Edition or the Athlon 128XXP++++, but rather in VIA's powerful enough but energy efficient chips.

Excuse me?

[Doktor Memory]

While god knows I'm the first to agree with the general sentiment that the slashdot editors are sucking the glass dick (see my sig, etc), are you seriously maintaining that the release of a white paper (ie: "We plan for our next generation of computers to be EVEN FASTER, woo!") detailing a series of products with no ship dates attached is much more important than a product that has actually shipped?

The Efficeon (god, what an awful name) and the new Eden are both real products that I can now order in batches of 1 or more. The press release you cite is just Sun saying -- again -- that this time, really for sure uh huh they've whipped the UltraSparc's performance issues...in the next version...real soon now.

Re:Excuse me?

[illumin8]

... are you seriously maintaining that the release of a white paper (ie: "We plan for our next generation of computers to be EVEN FASTER, woo!") detailing a series of products with no ship dates attached is much more important than a product that has actually shipped?

I guess I should have included news sources in my links, because there sure are a lot of them.

All sarcasm aside, your point is well taken. I like the article on the Sun site because it explains more about how the technology works than any of the news sites, but it seems that Slashdot editors are much more likely to accept a story if the link points to an "impartial" news source rather than a press release. Thanks for the tip.

The Efficeon (god, what an awful name) and the new Eden are both real products that I can now order in batches of 1 or more.

Actually, neither one of those products have shipped:

From Via's press release:

The VIA Eden-N processor is sampling now and is expected to start appearing in secure networking, entertainment and communication devices in Q1, 2004.

From Transmeta's press release:

... the Efficeon processor family will be competitive with, or outperform competing microprocessors operating within critical thermal limits such as the 7W limit for typical fanless notebook designs. Systems based on the processor are expected to begin shipping in the fourth quarter.

Re:Nice, but unfortunately...

[mocm]

Considering that the Centrino was Intels answer to the Crusoe and the Efficeon is Transmetas answer to the Centrino, you would expect that Transmeta will still be a player in the tablet market. Don't be surprised if the next HP tablet will use Transmeta again.
Here you will find a list of Efficion products.

Re:fp, yo

[jir0]

Actually, Transmeta does deliver pretty okay products. Yes, I know, you'll say with processors, Intel pretty much beat them up after releasing the low-power Centrinos. But they were actually one of the first guys to go for in power-efficient processing. They did mobile computing a lot of good. The very first laptops that really caught my attention were the low-power Crusoe-run Twinhead notebooks. 6 hours on 300 MHz was pretty amazing a few years back. They still do nice jobs now and then (see a nice article here). I still drool over the Fujitsu Lifebook P-series, most of which run on the Crusoe. I for one go for portability as the first priority for laptops. (I can always just ssh into my main box if I needed anything other than emacs.)

They also have a number of impressive cluster servers. Again, having low power consumption is making their high-performance servers look good, even among today's Blades.

Any innovations are still welcome. At the very least, it's nice to know there are projects who keep Intel working on new ways to be better. :)

Now about that silly name...

Re:trasmeta processor plus mobo

[Mattsson]

I'd rather use the VIA EPIA-V mini-ITX C3-533MHz.
They've got more powerful versions of this, but those require a cpu fan.
This one only need a passive heatsink. =)
If you add a ide->compactflash converter and use one of their fanless 55w psu's you've got a machine with *no* moving parts.

Re:fp, yo

[Hoser McMoose]

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.

Two Places To Look

[istartedi]

First, try BWI.com. There you can various types of boards that use the Transmeta CPUs (though Efficeon is probably not there yet). The most reasonably priced ones are made by Wincomm; but for some reason they aren't linked off BWI's main site any more. Last time I looked, I was still able to get the listing of Wincomm products by using their search function. Some projects such as the CharmIT wearable computer were based on the Boser HS-1600 board, which seems to be a popular choice. It costs something like $800-$1000. I have no idea why the things are so bloody expensive. Bear in mind that you are usually getting built-in memory and LCD controllers, video, sound, etc. It's almost a complete system. You still need a power supply, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Also, the chip is soldered to the board, so it's not a true CPU-mobo solution. Clips for the Crusoe do exist, it's just that the board makers haven't used them. I seem to recall having stumbled across one, but it was by a manufacturer that's not well known and I lost the link... Sorry. Oh, I almost forgot the best thing about BWI: They quote prices for onesies and twosies right there on the website. No need to call sales. What a refreshing approach!

The other site is All American There you can actually get Transmeta CPUs, but without a mobo to plug them into this is only of interest to you if you license the reference design from Transmeta and contract for the fabrication of your own boards. Technicly that's not nearly as daunting as it sounds. With the proper files, you can usually send these things off to be prototyped for not too much money, and of course volume production is even cheaper. It's just that the startup cost is high--licensing from Transmeta, and expensive proprietary packages to manipulate the designs if you want to customize them.

It's rather ironic that Linus is associated with a company that throws up so many barriers to hackers. And I'm saying this as someone who owns Transmeta shares and is disgusted with the way this is handled, but I'm just like the guy on teh commercial who "owns Nike". My stake is so small that nobody would listen to me. So I vent this stuff on Yahoo's finance board, and sometimes here.

Re:Two Places To Look

[TPFH]

I remember durring California's rolling blackouts, weren't there some people blaming the internet; ie increased computer usage (instead of fraud) back then? Anyway, I remember thinking about the Crusoe chips and maybe it would make sense to build low power consuming desktop PCs.

And you don't need power companies shutting down the power stations for fraud to motivate this. It is about time we start thinking of efficiancy in all walks of life. Yea, there are people that will actually use the power of a 2ghtz PC, but even those people might want to have a fileserver running ML Donkey 24 hours a day without turning their computer room into a sauna.

I just got on the p2p bandwagon this summer (yea, I'm late but whatever) and my computer room is in the basement and normally cool year round. This summer it was between 80-90 degrees most of the time.

I imagine the cost for the motherboards is in that they are not being mass produced. Well, maybe Transmeta ought to think about marketing these at companies and home users looking to reduce their electric bills.

Question: If you were to do parallel processing or clustering with transmeta chips would you get more bang for your electrical buck?