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

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.

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.

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]

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.