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

Wanted

[swordboy]

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...

here's what the chips are used for:

[pummer]

http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/gingerbreadvillag e/

Hooray!

[Hannes Eriksson]

No I can finally have a Gigaherz processor in my fax machine :-)

Re:Care?

[sporty]

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

Transmeta rocks.

[Qbertino]

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.

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.

Yes, but what for?

[Sebastopol]

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.

Re:I thought Transmeta was already dead

[cynyr]

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......

Game performance?

[Dark Paladin]

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.

Huh??

[ianashley]

"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?

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)

Transmeta vs VIA C3??

[-tji]

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.

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.

A question:

[falameufilho]

Now that Linus does not work at Transmeta anymore, do we still like them?

Re:Care?

[Waffle Iron]

Wrong, he is on sabbtical from Transmeta, he is still officially an employee.

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.

other architectures than x86?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?