Slashdot Mirror
Transmeta's New Smaller, Faster Chips Announced
billstewart writes "Transmeta announced their new 5900 and 5700 CPUs. They're 50% smaller than the 5800, intended for low-power, low-heat, high-speed applications, and contain an integrated Northbridge. They're sampling now, production in January 2004, and expect to have a mini-ITX board out in 1Q04. The core chip is a 128-bit VLIW hidden by x86 emulation (as opposed to their new Efficeon, which is 256-bit VLIW.) The difference between the 5900 and 5700 seems to be L2 cache size.
There are several other stories on Google News."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What do they use those chips for? Microwaves and stuff? Toaster ovens?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I've always ranted here about how we could use an industry standard chassis and AC/DC power spec for mini-ITX. If LCD monitor vendors could simply stick their panels into an open spec laptop chassis, we'd have oodles of cheap, interchangable laptops out there. And they wouldn't cost $900 to fix when you spill your free beer on them...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/gingerbreadvillag e/
What is theyre market share compared to ARM on mobile devices?
What is theyre largest customer? Sony notebooks?
No I can finally have a Gigaherz processor in my fax machine :-)
Geek rants since like... 2000 or something.
robots ?
I wonder if this will have enough horsepower, to accelerate all of the 'electronics of the future' we've been promised for so long.
This space intentionally left blank.
MiniITX'ers, soon. I hope to be one of them. Also, Linus is still employed by Transmeta.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
People who run home servers and get reamed on electric bills.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Say what you want, but these people have found a niche and deserve credit.
Their CPUs are sufficient for most tasks and not seldom run three to four times as long as comparable CPUs with the same amount of power. They are the equivalent to the 'kaizend' motors in the late generation portable cassette players ('walkmen'), seriously optimized for a specific goal: to consume as much minimum power as possible.
My friend has a Fujitsu Lifebook P with a 900 Mhz transmeta and it runs 16 hrs of the grid! And he even watches DVDs with it. Try that with a Pentium Mobile.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If the x86 is emulated through dynamic recompilation, does that mean you can compile Gentoo Linux on a transmeta and get the speed boost of native code?
Has transmeta found a real design win yet? Something over 1m units is considered REAL. They've been issuing press releases since they started, and i have yet to see any success. i guess loads of venture capital are keeping them afloat, b/c their SECC filings show pathetic revenue.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
not to respond to your non-troll but, this is being posted on a laptop using a transmeta TM5800 at 876mhz.....
i hope that these new chips fit in the old slots. it would be a nice upgrade for my laptop......
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
There's at least one Transmeta powered Tablet PC. And I think Fujitsu sold an ultraportable laptop with a Transmeta CPU.
Granted, I haven't checked out the market for a bit, since I've pretty much gone "console only", and the only PC games I play anymore I just wait until they hit "OS X" - or do without. (Not that I don't have an oversized old games library as it is - I don't need to buy anymore....)
But I have friends who do LAN parties, and I've wondered about getting a Shuttle kind of machine, or preferably something the size of a Cappachino computer. Small, slip it into a backpack, show up with just that and a flat screen (keyboard, mouse, etc) - but it would be a small machine just for PC LAN gaming. It wouldn't need a huge video card - anything that can run most games published 2003 at 800x600 would be fine.
I wonder if these Transmeta chips could be used this way.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
"They're 50% smaller than the 5800, intended for low-power, low-heat, high-speed applications.." Are there actually people out there demanding large high-power, high-heat, low-speed chips?
"Little...yellow...different."
sorry thought you might want to know what kind, this is a fujutsu p2110
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
HP has a Tablet PC that uses Transmeta Crusoe 5800. I have used it for some minutes, and looked like a "normal" tablet with an Intel processor. But I agree with you that these Crusoe babies are rare.
I am really lookin into getting myself a mini-itx board for my file server. This would be really nice to have, a nice speedy transmeta chip running the show.
snowulf.com
I care. I'm looking for something to replace my Athlon/1Ghz Linux box. It has done fairly well, but I setup something that has far more horsepower than my little website requires. I'm sure it's a waste of energy and I'd like to find something that fits in a small case, uses comparatively little power, and will work with RH. I'm sure I'm not alone...and so far my research has come up with fairly wasteful systems.
Could a low end Intel-based system do it? Maybe, but I'm actually interested in a lower power system more than initial cost.
*HE* is asking a stupid question and his homepage link points to combo scat porn and goatse.
It is, I hate to admit it. I've found that I don't get very excited over low power, lower everything CPUs for mobile use.
Give me that socket sucking power of my P4 any day.
Does anyone else feel that we are pass due for another speed revolution?
I believe Sharp made a laptop with a Crusoe in it. This laptop was among the thinnest I have ever seen. Literally, it was twice the thickness of my Toshiba e355, and im not exaggerating. Too bad it cost an arm, leg, and a penis.
The main power draw in electronic devices is still memory, mainly RAM and hard disk storage if it exists, no? To the point where the power requirements of the chips, short of using a P4 or something, are already dwarfed, right?
So what kinds of real-world applications would this be actively useful for?
And is the fabled "code morphing" ever going to offer the option of running any instruction set other than x86? Is it really worth the bother of tying yourself to the x86 instruction set if you're mainly doing embedded apps anyway, meaning machine code compatibility with desktop hardware is useless?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
They're low power, cold running chips. I doubt if you could toast bread with them ;)
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Microcenter has had them in Sharp Notebooks. The display model looked like a very nice ultraportable (reminded me of a Toshiba Portege - wish the Portege came with one). Apparently Sony has some VAIO models with Transmeta them as well.
You can find some retail Transmeta systems at Transmetazone.com.
Not any more. He now works for OSDL
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
From the article:
"The Crusoe TM5700/TM5900 processors are another significant step in advancing the cause of efficient computing," said Dr. Matthew R. Perry, president and CEO of Transmeta. "By delivering a solution that is 50 percent smaller than our existing Crusoe TM5800 processors, Transmeta allows system designers to further leverage the high performance and low-heat dissipation characteristics of Transmeta's proven hardware and software architecture for a wide range of new smaller form factor, fan-less designs."
Important tidbit not in the article, but needed to be:
Dr. Perry then proceeded to explain the seemingly confusing numbering scheme, "Well, since we had cut down the form factor some of thought we should also cut the model number down. But, we didn't want to alienate those who are used to seeing newer products with higher model numbers, so we compromised and named it higher and lower than its predecessor."
---
Two fish swim into a wall, one turns to the other and says, "Dam".
Look into an embedded PC, you'll probably find your low power solution there.
uh oh. This could be confusing, as well as OT.
Back on topic; many apps don't need P4's or AMD64 or PPC type horsepower. (I say apps as in embedded usage, not as in mozilla)
Because most of the parallelisim is n't visible at compile time, this is the same problem that Itanium or any other VLIW processor has.
So, how do these Transmeta chips compare to the VIA C3's, in terms of computing performance, and power/heat requirements?
VIA has been doing a very nice job with the C3, with several varieties, speeds, and sizes to be used in all sorts of commercial or hobbyist applications. They have a new mini-itx board, with dual ethernet ports for network gateway usage. And, their new C3 processor includes hardware AES support, with incredible performance for network or filesystem encryption.
It would be great to have an alternative. The TM chips seem to have some really interesting features. But, I have not seen any of these boards/chips available retail. They seem to be essentially OEM solutions for embedded devices. This positioning puts them head to head with many excellent non-x86 solutions, like the ARM, PowerPC, and Hitachi SH processors.
"Linus is still employed by Transmeta."
Not any more. He now works for OSDL
Wrong, he is on sabbtical from Transmeta, he is still officially an employee.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
*cough* You have been warned.
What is a "mallrat" actually?
Has this shown up in Gentoo portage yet?
I'd love something with 12hours battery life, regardless of processing speed (granted, anything less than comparable to a 350Mhz x86 would be a bit slow) so I can go outside to code, or to a cafe without having to sit next to a power outlet.
Slightly off topic, but is that squiggle the transmeta logo? Their site looks very much the same colour, but I don't see the logo itself there...
My first though on seeing it was "Who made debian green?"
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Until you look at the prices for a typical mini-itx case.
I hope the mini-itx format becomes much more popular. We need more competition in the tiny case area.
Any good sources of reasonably priced cases?
It's scary to see how fast a company can lose its esteem among certian linux geeks just because "Linus doesn't work there anymore". Scary. And I thought the hallmarks of geekism were integrity, being objective and data driven...
Wow! I'd definitely be willing to pay an arm and a leg for the thinnest laptop. Too bad it costs more.
that's an old email. 2.6.0 kernel changelog torvalds is at OSDL (open source development labs).
or goto slashdot archives on the topic.
or visit the lkml archives and read the email addy from the already done search.
Anyone know if there is a Beowulf Cluster of these chips or the VIA ones? And would a cluster comnparable in performance to a P4 generate as much heat or use as much power? I'm thinking about trying this because:
1. A Mini-ITX system is mad cheap.
2. They're very quiet.
3. Should be more redundant/reliable than a single processor system.
I have 2 servers right now. One is a Mini-ITX at 900 mhz and another one is an Athlon at 1.6 Ghz. The smaller one is more preferable because I live in a dorm room. Plus it's mad easy to carry around when I have to move. Furthermore, it doesn't draw a lot of power so it won't overload my UPS. A small cluster of these things could be interesting.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Now that Linus does not work at Transmeta anymore, do we still like them?
-- por uma vida + open source
Why haven't they gone out of business and returned the remaining money to the investors yet?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
to consume as much minimum power as possible
You could better phrase that, "to consume the least power possible."
provided that they are more powerful than VIA and less (price-wise), they should be fine. The only thing keeping me from doing my own ITX project besides the funds is the fact that I don't like VIA; have had some REALLY bad experiences with VIA chipsets in the past and with their CSRs.
/.'ers and such by the ba......er....that is if that particular person has 'em.
now if transmeta makes it so they have all the drivers available for not only the windows flavors but also *nix (and for BeOS for those hardcore fans), then they can probably get most
gotta give transmeta a hand for still trying.
> i hope that these new chips fit in the old slots. it would be a nice upgrade for my laptop......
I beleive that if you open your laptop you'll find that the CPU is non-socketed. Sockets just add weight after all. Does Transmeta even make socketed CPUs?
Actually my dorm room is usually noticably warmer than my common room because of the 4 computers I have inside.
Of course it is! You're running what are essentially 4 250- to 300-watt heaters in a small room. One computer would produce a noticable (heck, downright significant) increase in heat.
And by the way, while a lot of the heat coming from your PC is in fact from the computationally intensive components (CPU, RAM, video card), there is also a large amount of it coming from your power supply. There is 110V of AC power coming out of that hole in your wall, regardless of how many volts you choose to use. Since your PC only uses 12V (and 5V) of DC power, your power supply has to do work to convert it into something your computer can use. The transformer in your power supply steps it down and flattens it into a DC current, but doing so is not a perfectly efficient process. Quite a bit of heat is generated.
I've not seen any numbers to support this, but I'd guess that almost half (if not more) of the heat generated by a PC comes from the power supply alone.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Then you haven't read very many /. posts.
MiniITX'ers, soon. I hope to be one of them.
Me too. I am still hunting for that elusive, silent-but-powerful living room media computer.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Summing up the important issues about Transmeta chips (I'm posting this from my Fujitsu P Transmeta-based laptop),
a) Transmeta's biggest problem is the lack of speed. It runs most productivity software and normal browsing (not Mozilla - Opera and IE are fine) at comfortable speeds. Don't try to run it as a J2EE server or something like that, though.
b) Transmeta's biggest advantage is the battery life. As another poster mentioned, I regularly get 10 hours from my battery, and that's *real life*, not some artificial benchmark.
In sum, it's the best laptop chip ever if you don't have more than moderate speed needs. Perfect for the casual user - and for people doing lightweight HTML/CSS development, like me.
Their chip could probably fit into an expensive Ball Grid Array test/burn-in socket that costs half again as much as the whole laptop.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Memory power requirements are forgettable.
Or have you ever seen Ram or 2.5"discs in notebooks with fans? No? Guess why...
If you arent using your "corsair golden eagle fishing thuna blabla 500 ultra pro" overclocker Ram, you can get away with 1-3 Watt for 512 MB RAM in a notebook. At least with 266 Mhz ddr and 256mbit chips.
And modern harddiscs are quite inexpensive, powerwise. Heck, even normal Desktop Drives are rated at about 6-7 Watt. Laptop drives optimized for low power are more likely to use a third of that.
What you fail to recognice is the Screen as single most demanding component besides the cpu. People want bigger and brighter screens, and to create photons you need power. You cant just do a die-shrink like with ram or cpus to reduce the power requirements, you have to live with them. You can get 60 Lumen/W from your flouroszent illumination (but only on your happy day), you block 2/3 of it because you need colour filters, and another 1/3 because absorbtion/ect,and more for the space between the pixels, ect, and you have 10 cd/watt output at most.(in reality it should be even worst. Wall-plug->eye efficiency could be as low as 2-3 cd/watt)
And people like displays with at least 100cd/m^2 because else its unreadable in bright daylight outside.
DO the math....
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
But let's apply the corporate press release decoder ring:
"He/she has made valuable contributions to the project and will be missed" -> He/she screwed up. Good riddance.
"Is leaving to spend more time with his/her family" -> Has been ousted
"Is leaving to pursue personal interests" -> Has been ousted
"Gone on sabbatical" -> Has left the company for good and will never, ever return. Further press release confirming official resignation to follow within 9 months.
yes it will, someday....
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
Your sig mentions: "0x2B | ~0x2B == 0xFFFFFFFF". That's not quite true -- you need to add parentheses to make the statement evaluate to 1 in C. If you wrote the above in a C program, the compiler would parse it as "0x2B | (~0x2B == 0xFFFFFFFF)", and that expression has the value 0x2B.
On a side note, it's worth noting this even more amusing property:
Cosmic, eh?
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
link (has pictures too): http://www.kurnspatrick.com/sharpmm2.htm
t re v237.htm
Ubiq Computing from Akiba Hotline wrote a review on the Sharp PC-MM2-5NE a couple days ago (unfortunately in japanese ):
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2003/1209/ho
(use a translator service e.g. world.altavista.net or any others)
Some notes from the review:
They used a PowerPoint 2002 file at 4.02MB and timed opening times
Model 1st time 2nd time 3rd time
Efficeon 28.04 18.95 18.78
TM8600 1GHz
(PC-MM2-5NE)
Crusoe 51.91 29.44 29.78
TM5800 1GHz
(PC-MM1-H5W)
Full starting time with the MM2: 43.70 seconds
With the MM1 (Crusoe): 58.25 seconds
(I'm assuming this is Windows XP Home with nothing tweaked, and the same application setup - it would be silly to compare startup times with different application suites in start-up.)
The 256MB on board appears to be a permanent fixture and not upgradable, in the goal of making the MM2 as light as possible.
The hard drive model is a Hitachi (HGST) DK14FA-20; 20GB, 1.8".
That "MOBILE switch" I mentioned earlier, according to the review, can increase the battery time up to 40%. It would be interesting to see actual numbers with this (40%? that's a lot).
The keyboard is 17mm pitch, 1.7mm stroke. Compare this to the P-2k series with 17mm pitch and 2mm key stroke. This means the Sharp keyboard will be shallower. The LCD doesn't have a latch, so I assume it'll be like the P-5k and Sony models with a spring-loaded screen.
At a brightness level 3 (whatever that is) and using both Office XP (whichever apps, I don't know) and Netscape Communicator (and "etc." - whatever that means!) - the review managed to get 2.4 hours off the standard battery. The standard battery is 19.98Wh with 11.1V/1.8A. They mentioned in passing that the Sony 505 Extreme (X505) got 2.8 hours, but that's not a good comparison since that battery is 22.2Wh. The Sharp model is also much cheaper than the Sony.
They also have an MPEG movie, but my download was corrupted or something (though I suspect it's some kind of powerpoint presentation in Japanese so we wouldn't be able to understand anyway).
Another thing - the TM8600 supports AGP4x, but the AGP operates at 2x on the Sharp with ATI mobility radeon; the article cites Transmeta as saying that the AGP bus with Efficeon isn't entirely stable. I'm not sure what to make of this, but surely it'll be better than the video in the P-2k.
I'd like to see a desktop system built with maybe 8 of these running in SMP. You'd probably have about the same raw computing power as a high-end Intel or AMD dual-processor machine, and probably less power consumption. Where you'd really win is with usability and interactivity - a good SMP OS would handle multitasking properly among the CPUs. Your web browser would never interrupt your mp3 player again, and the UI would be unhindered by background processes. This may especially be the case with the on-die memory controllers.
The only problem being the fact that they could never sell it... only high-end server versions of Windows support high numbers of SMP CPUs. Obviously this isn't a problem for Linux users.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
I just did the math on my 17" viewsonic TFT.
It turns out that my 260 nits (cd/m^2, typical) multiplied by an area of 13.3"*10.6" divided by a typical power use of 33W result with as high efficiency as: 0.71 cd/W
And this panel is supposed to be energy efficient (most 17" panels use some 40W).
Geek rants since like... 2000 or something.
I remember when they first came out with their crusoe chips they were marketting them as viable alternatives to pentiums and k6's (or a k6 variant). The problem was that their performance loss couldn't justify the battery life increase and so few manufacturers took the risk to built laptops with them or market them as heavily as their pentium laptops.
I'm surprised transmeta lasted this long and so I guess that's an indicator that they weren't dot com vaporware. However, I hope to see this time they try to market them not as laptop replacements but just really fast chips for embeded applications or portable devices. Battery life is a very big consideration in designing mp3 players, cell phones, cameras, etc. What this may bring soon is smaller devices that rely on less chips since they can take advantage of transmetas more powerful chip than what it's replacing. If not, it could simply allow more features in handhelds that already exist instead of trying to invent new markets (tablet's to some extent).
I welcome a new generation of Transmeta CPU's, to hopefully bring sub-notebook power forward a leap.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
In 1998, some engineers at Corel took 10 StrongARMs and connected them on a custom backplane, made a couple of modifications to Apache, and were able to dish out close to one million web pages per minute.
I'd love to see someone put 8 of these on a board with a gig of memory, and two ethernet jacks. One would go to the network, the other would go to your file server/SAN/NAS/other_buzzword.
Put 2 gigs of memory on it for disk caching, and for a pretty low amount of money and electrical power, you could dish out VERY large numbers of web pages.
Shoot, take it farther: Have another unit based on them that runs LVS as a load-balancer, and put several of the servers behind it. All of the sudden, for $2000, you'd have the capability to dish out a billion web pages per day (or more), with load-balancing and realtime failover to boot!
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Get ye an old BlueBerry iBook then ^^
GPL Deconstructed
Should I not be running Mozilla on my Fujitsu P?
If you're looking for a much lower-end solution (e.g. you're running a web server on your DSL line), makes some low-cost little boards, one of which can support laptop hard drives. No graphics, supports a variety of Linux and *BSD operating systems.
Or you can get a used laptop from eBay or a local used-computer dealer. Power use is low, size is small, operating system support is easy to figure out, and they theoretically have built-in UPSs, though used laptop batteries are often pretty dead. Prop them up for good airflow to avoid heat problems.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
hehe, it only cost half my penis =)
If 1 billion chinee buy
Tsinghua Unisplendour Lilly
TMTA stock will be through the roof!
Of course, if what you really want is a quiet desktop, there's a lot to be said for running a single-processor quiet X-Windows screen on your desktop, and if you need more CPU, stick a server in the basement next to the furnace.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Damn straight. My Via M10000 based mini-ITX system draws about 50 watts (48-52) with folding@home running. My XP2600+ based PC draws 185 watts. Considering the outrageous $0.12-0.13/kw-hour we pay around here, that's a big difference on the electic bill.
For a while I've wanted to use a crusoe chip in various little embedded devices, simply because they're so easy to run fanless. And I know there are companies that make small form factor (5.25" or smaller) boards like these. Problem is, they're impossible to order unless you're getting them in huge quantities. These things could be a hobbiest's dream, much better (lower heat, smaller) than the mini-itx C3 boards a lot of people are using, you just can't find them. I've only found one place that sells them, and the prices they charge are ridiculous. Easily twice what an equivalent C3 board costs (only the crusoe has a tiny little heat sink while the C3 has a heat sink that spans the whole board).
Does anyone know where you can find these things for a reasonable amount of money?
I meant to say that Soekris makes some low-cost boards, etc.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I wondered who Via was going to move to, after Ezra and Nehemiah. By one sequence, Esther would be the next logical step. By any other sequence, I'm not enough of a scholar of Hebrew history to have a decent guess.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Green Destiny at Los Alamos has 240 TM5600s.
It's a balance of purchase price vs electric cost. For my purposes (and electric rates) the breakeven point is just over a year between using my current cast-offs for a home server, and buying a new C3-based system.
But I'm unaware of bargain-priced Transmetas that would reach even the payback period of a C3.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Actually, not just home servers. Desktop PCs as well. Although I can't say I know the workings of chips and motherboards in any great depth, I have managed to build my last two PCs from parts, rather than as complete units. However, despite a Zalman *quiet* fan in the latest one, there is still too much noise from the things!
What I really want is a dead quiet and economical PC that can sit in my living room, and remain on unnoticed in the background. It doesn't have to play games, all it needs to do is run SuSE, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.org. Quietly!
Unfortunatley, can't seem to do that with AMD or Intel, and standard off-the-shelf motherboards. I've tried looking for a standard form Transmeta motherboard, and couldn't find one.
I can't believe I'm alone in wanting a quiet life!
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
I know that the idea of a chip which runs java natively has been bandied around already, but I've always wondered why Transmeta hasn't released other architectures under their code morphing software, specifically java. All the arguments I've heard against a java machine have been due to the fact that java is more than just a series of byte codes, it's also an api. It seems to me that a combination of a crusoe chip, the right code morphing software, and the equivalent of JNode as an OS would allow for some fast and efficient java machines. Is this possible?
These things should make the ideal no-footprint, low-wattage, low-noise, high performance thinclient for LTSP. Build it right into the back of a TFT panel.
Transmeta: why can't I get them this way? Don't tell me there's no market for thinclients --I know better.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
Or just more whining about how the benchmarks are unfair?
All they've done is spin their low performance into whines..
Maybe they were making fun of slash dot posts ...
Have they ever ported say... Any other arch to the crusoe?
I realize its a return on investment sort of thing, but it would be cool to have say an instant PPC board for the developer types.
I can't hear my Dell Dimension GX240 Pentium4 desktop at work, but I must admit the office isn't exceptionally quiet.
The "good" gamer ready---even nominally---ones take an athlon---Get a 2500+ and underclock it (before week 39) and it will run cool.
The nice new shuttle has an NForce2 MB, dual vid out, (GF440 mx class??) and an unused AGP slot--- Tiny, beautifully built machine, longing to be a killer MythTV/Freevo box as is, or a nice gamer box adding a vid card ($ to taste)
I drooled on one Sunday. Having 4 local Frys is a bad, bad thing...
Amazing: Beowulf Cluster post not a troll!
The guy makes a good point, but Mini-Itx anything costs 2-3x more than its std equivalent.
First, Ditzel wanted to do a fast VLIW--the great wide hope--faster than Intel. It didn't quite work out but someone at Transmeta lucked into the low power idea. Great idea. It took awhile but with enough perserverance and capital they made it work.
But at the end of the day, they get to compete with Intel. This is sort of like winning a bunch of thumb-wrestling contests and, as first prize, getting to go a few rounds with Mike Tyson. Intel doesn't play nice, has a multiple ear appetite, *deep* pockets and can out-manufacture anyone.
I wish I could buy a Crusoe; I really think as an idea it rocks. But life has slapped enough sense into me to be skeptical. They have less than a year of money left. But someone, AMD?, will buy them.
Ditzel reminds me of the bad guys in Bond movies. Instead of killing Bond when they have a chance, they have to tie him up with a beautiful girl and leave the room. Ditzel lacks execution skills.
Mod this up please, out of points.
Why yes, not "funny" but "interesting"...
I'll definitely be one of the first rounds using
the Mini-ITX with this chip.
I've been waiting for them to do this for quite some
time and the possiblilites for this are making me drool
as I type this.........
Go ahead... waste your time playing games.
Makes it all the easier for ME!
You don't have to send the lolly around to ME twice
ROTFLMAO!
The OEMs are pretty good at making quiet computers, atleast the office computers. I bought a used HP Vectra - a PIII 866Mhz with a 7200RPM hard drive, and I can't believe how quiet the thing is. It's cooled by a single low RPM fan, and a couple of clever ducts for the air to blow around in. The sides of the case are fairly thick plastic, and seems to utilize some strategically placed foam to reduce vibrations. It turns out that the hum from my old monitor is louder than the computer! I bet it would even be more silent if I swapped out the 7200RPM Maxtor for a 5400RPM Samsung.
Seeing how Transmeta just won't go away. How about sticking them in something else that is just as persistant?
AMIGAS!
Great googly moogly that'll make you wake up at mights in a cold sweat!
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
It's great that Transmeta made some new chips. Now I hope that someone uses them as well..........
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss
All I know of Torvald's involvement with Transmeta is what I've read on Slashdot and a few other sites, but in his defense I would guess he didn't screw up/wasn't ousted, as you flippantly jest. Rather, he probably left to focus more on his baby, Linux, after he realized it has more of a future than Transmeta. And that seems to be exactly what he has been doing, given the relatively rapid progression of kernel releases.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
anyone know where you can find these, and how much they cost? sounds intriguing.
Please, Someone implement something along those lines.
:)
NEEDED: One Standard size Mid-Tower ATX case w/400w psu
One 4 CPU Transmeta Cluster on a board Motherboard.
(Why bother with just 4-way SMP when you can get 4 whole motherboards on one?)
Run some clustering software that's intelligent enough to distribute
apps and tasks between each other and you've got
the biggest bang for your buck since the invention of dynamite.
Or something like that.
I'm sorry sir, you'll have to check your attitude at the door, we don't allow that kinda
stupidity in here.
Looks like someone outside Transmeta recently figured out how...
c ti on=detail&PostNum=1946&Thread=1&entryID=25609&room ID=13
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?a
It'll be interesting to see how this develops...
There are hundreds of varieties of little Transmeta-using subnotebooks running around in Japan that seem to sell rather well.
Curious:
how much power is typically used up by a standard CRT monitor vs. LCD, and how much power is used by the same but when in power saving mode?
Ben, you've become an UberGeek! Take me as your padawan!!!
kind of negated by the 10 disk raid array
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Pick up a 75/90/100 MHz pentium box for free somewhere (behind your local computer shop).
My 90MHz Pentium runs a caching web proxy, a distributed.net personal proxy, and still has time to pump out one distributed.net work unit a day.
Ron Paul 2012
blah!
Any man who cares to reduce the risk of burning his penis?
Lamness filter.
... during the winter months I leave every boxen turned on at full CPU usage. Free processing power for a few hundred watts of heating!
You missed the point. It's power. The old 90MHz CPU's where hot and power hungry,
MiniITX'ers already have the VIA C3 chips that offer similar power consumption numbers and equal or better performance and a very low price tag.
Of course, this announcement by Transmeta is in direct response to VIA's announcement of physically smaller chips a few months back. VIA's Antaur processor is the exact same idea, take a small, low-cost and low powered x86 core and package it up real small. VIA's chip is 35mm x 35mm for the entire package. Transmeta comes in a slightly smaller 21mm x 21mm package.
In the end, the Transmeta has a slight power consumption advantage (clock for clock) and a slight size advantage, but really neither are very significant, and VIA may have a performance advantage (or, conversly, they can negate the power consumption advantage by using a lower-clocked processor) and traditionally has had quite a large price advantage. Both are fighting for a pretty small and low-profit market though.
According to Sandpile.org, the 90MHz Pentium consumes a grand total of 9.0W of power when going full-bore. Transmeta's claiming power consumption numbers of about 6 or 7W for their chips. The Transmeta chips will have a slight advantage in terms of dynamic power management (almost non-existant on the old Pentium classic), but really we're talking about a few watts here. Throughout the course of a year you're looking at a difference of about $2 to $3 in electrical costs. At that rate, the Transmeta chips have got to be REAL cheap to beat out spending 5 or 10 bucks on a Pentium system.
Actually it has more to do with the fact that the chips where not as fast as promised. Linus working there was brought a lot of press for sure but the shine left the apple long before Linus left.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.