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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."

7 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Wanted by swordboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

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    Life is the leading cause of death in America.
  2. Re:Care? by sporty · · Score: 4, Interesting

    People who run home servers and get reamed on electric bills.

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    ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only

  3. Transmeta rocks. by Qbertino · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
  4. Re:I thought Transmeta was already dead by cynyr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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......

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  5. Game performance? by Dark+Paladin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
  6. Transmeta vs VIA C3?? by -tji · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. other architectures than x86? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?