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."

Comments

Re:Care?

[subk]

MiniITX'ers, soon. I hope to be one of them. Also, Linus is still employed by Transmeta.

Re:Care?

[Jungle guy]

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.

Re:Native code?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would require GCC to support "Transmeta native" as a target architecture, and it doesn't. Furthermore, it won't--ever. From what I understand, Transmeta's chips are not designed to be compatible with each other--i.e. every new chip potentially has a totally different architecture. This is masked by the fact that they all emulate x86, which is a non-moving target.

It's a potentially advantageous strategy because it allows them to make rather major design changes to their chips relative to other manufacturers. Whether it will actually pan out or not is another matter.

Anyway, long story short: Transmeta chips are designed to emulate; they are not designed to run native code (err, except the code morphing software itself)

Re:IF...

[I8TheWorm]

The Compaq T-1000 tablet/laptop, Sharp and NEC at least had one at one time.

Re:Care?

[Tough Love]

"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.

Transmeta in Laptops

[happyfrogcow]

For those of you wondering where Transmeta can be found (like I was), Here's a list of laptops

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.

Re:Transmeta rocks.

[imsabbel]

Dont underestimate the power requirements of the Pentium M.
Yes, its a lot friendlier than all other "big" cpus, but if you use a lot of cpu-power, it still needs >25Watt. Thats a lot more than the whole rest of the system (ok, not if you are dvd-burning while using your mobile geforece 5700 to play doom3 on your 17" widescreen high brighness lcd, but you get the point...)
Of course most of the time you dont need full-power, but still when idling it uses 5-7 Watt, more than the Transmeta with 100% load.

The only problem is that the transmetas have limited performance. While pentium M can deliver in peak situation (but with a lot of power), the transmeta cannot.

And your numbers are from soviet russia, arent they? (IAW: bullshit)

10-20W would be a normal desktop board. 3-8 watt for normal Laptop(with ram, but without fance gfx).
10 Watt for a hd is normal for a 10000rpm 3.5" disc. A 2.5" laptop disc is more likely to use 1.5-3 Watt, if its running at all.
And 20-30 Watt would be a bad 15" or a very good 17" Lcd monitor with 200+ cd/m^2. For a 15" high brightness destop replacement Notebook, 15 Watt, perhaps 20 watt with max brightness.
But your "long running" subnotebook with 10.4" 75cd/m^2 screen wont use much more than 5-7 Watt.

Via Mini-ITX solutions; Soekris; Laptops

[billstewart]

Via makes a range of mini-itx boards using their low-power x86 system-on-a-chip clones. You'll often see them in Shuttle Barebones systems. The slower ones tend to be fanless, though the faster ones do need fans. Most of them have built-in graphics on the motherboard, which is nice from a power perspective - it's not blazingly fast gamer-box video-producer stuff, but it's perfectly adequate otherwise, and you save the space, heat, power consumption, and slot usage that a faster graphics card would use.

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.

Re:Transmeta vs VIA C3??

[-tji]

Good point... The new generation of VIA processors continue to create interesting possibilities.

This article has some information on upcoming VIA processors/boards. A new processor package that is about the size of a penny, and the nano-ITX board for ultra small devices looks really cool.

But, the thing I want in that article is the proto Dual Processor C5P motherboard, with dual ethernets and a DVI display output. That would make a great little linux server and/or gateway box.