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Transmeta's New Smaller, Faster Chips Announced

Posted by simoniker on from the mini-vroom-vroom dept.

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."

1 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Native code? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)