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Sharp Debuts New Transmeta-based Laptop
kpogoda writes "Transmeta's new Efficeon processor will debut today within a new trim and slim Sharp notebook. In case you don't remember, the processor family is known for its extremely low power consumption and blazingly high computing speeds."
"The notebook's standard battery will last three hours under normal conditions. An extended battery will add six more hours of computing time and 0.6 pounds, Hanly says." It doesn't seem very different from a common laptop... batteries' life is still a big problem.
Computer are useless: they can only give you answers. - Pablo Picasso
That's the Crusoe chip. These machines have a new chip, the Efficeon. Quoting from the article:
"The new Efficeon TM8600 is designed to improve performance while maintaining the low power consumption required by ultraportable notebooks--such as the 2-pound MM20. Sharp's tests showed that Efficeon delivers about 1.4 times the performance of Crusoe, Hanly says."
I don't know if 1.4 times the Crusoe should be considered fast, but at least it's faster...
"It doesn't seem very different from a common laptop... batteries' life is still a big problem."
If you look at the weight of the laptop 2 pounds for the 3 hours and 2.6 pounds of 6 additional hours. That is lighter than a conventional laptop. Hell, my battery prolly weighhs 2 punds for 3 and a half hours. So this does use less power. The battery is just smaller.
Evolution or ID?
While I love their products, the slashdot title of "blazingly high" clock speeds is a little misleading.
From the article: "A base configuration of the notebook includes the 1-GHz Efficeon processor, 512MB of memory, a 20GB hard drive, and a 10.4-inch display for an estimated starting price of $1499. Sharp will take preorders for the notebook as of Monday, and it will ship in April."
So we are looking at around 1ghz.
No 1.4 times Crusoe is not fast, since the Crusoe was/is kinda slow. Anyway the comment implied that the line was fast, but as stated in the linked article the Crusoe was panned for its performance.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
Sharp Shows Slim, Trim Notebook
New Actius MM20 is first to feature Transmeta's new Efficeon chip.
Tom Krazit, IDG News Service
Monday, March 15, 2004
The first notebook available in the United States with Transmeta's new Efficeon processor will be announced by Sharp Systems of America on Monday.
The new Actius MM20 is an improved version of the MM10, says Terry Hanly, product marketing manager for Sharp Systems, a division of Sharp Electronics.
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The MM10 used Transmeta's older Crusoe processor, which was praised for its miserly power consumption but panned for its performance.
The new Efficeon TM8600 is designed to improve performance while maintaining the low power consumption required by ultraportable notebooks--such as the 2-pound MM20. Sharp's tests showed that Efficeon delivers about 1.4 times the performance of Crusoe, Hanly says.
Sharp also improved performance in the MM20 by adding PC2100 (266-MHz) DDR SDRAM. The notebook now comes with 512MB of memory, up from 256MB in the older MM10.
The notebook's standard battery will last three hours under normal conditions. An extended battery will add six more hours of computing time and 0.6 pounds, Hanly says.
Portable PC
A base configuration of the notebook includes the 1-GHz Efficeon processor, 512MB of memory, a 20GB hard drive, and a 10.4-inch display for an estimated starting price of $1499. Sharp will take preorders for the notebook as of Monday, and it will ship in April.
The MM20 is designed as a second notebook for corporate executives or frequent business travelers that prefer something lightweight when traveling, Hanly says.
Sharp will include a base station and cable with the MM20 that allows users to connect the notebook to their regular PC through a USB port and use the notebook as an external hard drive.
Specially configured software from Iomega allows users to make changes to documents on their regular PC that will be automatically synchronized with the MM20. Conversely, if a user makes changes to a document on the road, the updated version of that document will automatically replace the older version on the regular PC when the units are connected, Hanly says.
A version of this notebook has been available in Japan, Hanly says. She does not know if a version will ship in Europe.
The new Muramasa has been out in Japan since January. It has had some nice reviews and keeps up well with Pentium-M modells of similar clock speed (see this Japanese review). And it is much cheaper.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Your post contains some errors, I believe.
IIRC, the Pentium-4 die was stripped of extraneous chip functions in order to maximise the clock speed. These more efficient parts of the chip were re-introduced in Pentium 4M, to enable the system to run more efficiently at lower clock speeds. Perhaps the actual transistors themselves are on both chips, but only enabled in one format or the other.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this, Transmeta's tend to run alot cooler then Intel/Amd...
I know personally after sitting in a class at university with my Dell my legs feel like they are about to melt. Anyways Transmeta has exact stats on the site but its somewhere around 1/4 of the heat output, personally thats why I am considering a Transmeta next round....
what these processors are known for. Benchmarks show that. That's not to say it's a bad processor, and maybe the Efficeon will turn out a little sweeter. Meanwhile, there isn't a whole lot about Transmeta's stuff that stands out. Except the wacky design.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
2.6 pounds with 3+6= 9 hours of battery life.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Centrino is not a chip. It is a "system" comprised of three parts:
/ demo/wo rks.htm?iid=ipp_demworks+tab&
Intel(R) Pentium M processor
Intel(R) 855 Chipset Family
Intel(R) PRO/Wireless Network Connection
Basically, Intel repackaged and "branded" some existing technologies in an effort to squeeze out other wireless hardware manufacturers (if it ain't Intel WiFi, you can't call it "Centrino," and a successful branding campign makes people want Centrino whether or not they know what it actually is).
Anyway, your question is stil valid, but to technically nitpick it's really about the Pentium M processor.
More info:
http://intel.com/products/mobiletechnology
* Please do not read my signature.
At CES, they had one, and it was absolutely dwarfed by my Nokia 6360 phone. Take a look:
While the phone is a 'big' one the laptop was thinner, and it weighed nothing. Very cool.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13578
These ultra-light models don't click until you hold one, but when you do, you look at the standard ultra-lights and wonder how people use them.
-Charlie
You should mean the M series, because there is a lot more to it than PM and variable clock, something the regular Pentium line has had for years. Read this article and you'll realize just how much went into it.
XeoMage
Intel Pentium M Thermal Design Power is listed as 24.5 Watt at 1.7 GHz, a FAR cry from the 7 Watt you claim
The 900 MHz and 1GHz ones are the 7 Watt models, but how those perform compared to an Efficeon I was unable to find.
Cooper
--
I don't need a pass to pass this pass!
- Groo The Wanderer -
That really depends on what you're going to use your laptop for.
.NET (or Eclipse) pretty nippily, and still play music while it's doing so without stuttering. I want it to be able to compress music to MP3 without making it completely unusable while it's doing so.
My laptop is my development and entertainment computer. I want it to be able to cope with XP and Visual Studio
My current laptop (Dell Inspiron 5150) does all of that fine. It has a reasonable battery life (3 hours or so if I'm not playing games), a reasonable graphics card (GeForce FX 5200 - not great, but not too bad) and 1Gb of memory to make up for the disk being slow. Its processor is nice and nippy at 3.06GHz, and having used a P3/733 for a long time, it *does* make a difference.
In terms of portability, most of the time I'm only carrying the laptop to/from the car, so it's not a problem. Lugging it around in the house is no hassle at all. It's heavy, but it's not like I'm running a marathon with it.
Basically, I'd rather go for heavy and powerful than light and slow - because of what I use my laptop for. Not everyone will want to use it in the same way as me, of course, but I'm pointing out that not everyone has the same priorities as you, either.
There is an option to optimize for the Transmeta processor line in the kernel configuration. That option is passed along to GCC to make sure the kernel will run as fast as possible. So GCC supports the Transmeta system.
There are also things like LongRun support, etc. that are in the kernel configuration, that don't necessarily involve GCC options.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Fujitsu 'did it right' with the P-Series.
It would be nice to have a faster processor but the flexibility the P-Series (I have the 2120) is unmatched. 8 hours+ battery life and when you add in a 7200rpm drive it is not as sluggish.
Games are best avoided here but I didn't buy it for mobile gaming just mobile working and notes taking in class.
"Survival of the fittest Max, and we've got the fucking gun!" - Pi
Transmeta makes wholesale changes to the backend architecture of these chips with each release. The x86 frontend is the only thing that they guarantee to remain stable.
A compiler producing native Transmeta code would need to emit (wildly) different code for each different revision. I read a quote from Linus somewhere that the scheduling and parallelism issues are very, very messy.
So that is why you don't see native Transmeta compilers, although I have heard of large customers tweaking the translation software for higher FPU performance.
But what I thought you would make fun of was the submitter who was talking about Transmeta's incredible high speeds. NOT.
The very first thing that you see when logging into a KDE system for the first time is a personalisation wizard that asks you a couple of questions about how you'd like things to work.
One of the things it asks you is how much eye candy you want. There is a slider that goes from "fewer effects" to "more effects".
Furthermore, KDE has been getting faster and faster since KDE 2. When KDE 3.2 was release, a lot of people mentioned how fast it felt compared with the previous version.
They brag about 7 watts power consumption at about 1GHz... IBM was selling G3 processors at that speed with a 5 watt consumption in October 2001. ..."At speeds of 1GHz, the [750FX] chip consumes only five watts of power"
So the transmetta chip uses 40% MORE power than a similar speed chip that has been on the market for 2.5 years. Hardly something to get excited about.
I've used kde since the 1.0 days, upgrading all along on my dual ppro-200. Even in the slowest 2.0 days, it ran fast enough on my system. Sure I turned the eye-candy slider way down when I configured KDE the first time, but that is all. It works, and is fast enough.
The only time I have problems is when I hear the harddrive grinding away, swapping. Even then I'm running something heavy duty in addition to KDE, something that can take up most of my memory alone.
The native instruction set isn't well-suited to host an operating system (see also Linus's take, it's too much of a moving target (TM changes it all the time and keeps the frontends stable; without this flexibility they would be entirely lost), and compiling for the native instruction set would eliminate all the benefits of code morphing (the dynamic optimizations, etc). Efficeon has a lot of potential; here's hoping Transmeta can get bugs sorted out and become competitive.
Go to this Mini-Itx site and scroll down to the review of "Teeny Weeny PCs"
Hope this helps!
Fellowship 9/11
I have the older MM10 model, with the transmeta 1GHz. I love the machine though it is not the quickest. The only problem? They seem to be OVERLY dedicate. I had purchased my original last July. After 3 weeks of minimal usage, the screen went bad. Sharp sent me a refurbished unit (though I had paid full price for a new unit just 3 weeks early). About a month ago, the replacement went bad (battery was bad and possibly the charge circuitry went bad as well). They have since sent me a refurbished unit and battery and I've been ok since then. It's a great machine, but you really have watch out for it.
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
Well, from my viewpoint, it's a power/speed tradeoff. Here's my take from the list of laptops you might want:
I'd say what you want depends on what you need. Cost not being a factor, I'd be happy with a Centrino/Pentium-M. If I wanted super low power/heat, I'd go with a Efficeon. If I wanted OSX (yummy), I'd of course, go with an ibook (still wating for those powerbook G5's). If I want cheap, AMD has me covered with their XP-M offerings. If I wanted a powerhouse/gaming 'top, I'd definitely go for an A-64M (just impressive). What I'd avoid: the P4M (abomination).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Is it really all that much faster than the Crusoe? I've got a Sony Vaio C1MW with an 866 MHz Crusoe in it and it's just barely fast enough as it is.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I mostly agree with your sentiment until you say the Sharp Actius is a "plae imiation of the ... PowerBook."
Ok, you obviously don't own a laptop or know what the fuck you're talking about. The Actius weighs 2 pounds and has one internal spindle (hard drive) with a travel weight not much more (very small, light power adapter). The PowerBook weighs ~5 pounds and has two internal spindles. It's travel weight is more than that still. If there's no difference betwee 2 and 5 pounds... I just don't have anything else to say to that. You're clearly clueless on the issues and are merely plagarising the popular opinion.
First off, I just finished ordering one, with the extended battery. Now for why:
I use a Laptop virtually all day, every day. I currently work on a Thinkpad T23 with a 1.3GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 14" Screen, etc. I add a 802.11g card when in office and a T-Mobile wireless WAN card everywhere else. I love my laptop, but I have three complaints: 1. Weight, 2. Heat (holy crap it gets hot), and 3. battery life. I also have a Sony Picturebook which address these issues, but it's TOO small and lacks a LOT of connectivity. I use a Zaurus with Opie and love it. I have long wished that I could get a "really big Zaurus" with integrated WiFi, good storage, etc. That's essentially how I view the MM20. Of course that is predicated on my getting Linux on it, but I am confident that given some time, that is quite doable. A 1GHz proc, half a gig of RAM, acts as a USB2 hard-drive when connected to my desktop, integrated 802.11g, 2 lbs. and a 10" screen...it's PERFECT for my needs. Anyone want to buy a Thinkpad?
The tm8x00 Efficeon is much faster than any form of PIII cpu at the same clock speed.
stop smoking crack and look at the benchmarks.
On the slower, colder end you're forgetting the VIA C3 chip that is available in a few laptops and tablets. It uses less watts than the Efficeon and gives off less heat. It is also cheaper. However, it is considerably slower per clock cycle and doesn't have the power management built into it like the Transmeta chips. I have a Crusoe tablet, and I'd like to compare it directly to a VIA-based machine.
On the fast and hot end you're forgetting about laptops with the full P4 in them (or even the new ones with P4EE or Prescott). I also have one of these (full P4). It is hotter than hell, and I can't keep it on my lap for more than half an hour without worrying that the sweat on my thighs will short it out. Also 12 lbs vs 3 lbs is not so comfortable.
Basically, there are a lot of options depending on what you want. I personally like the laptop form factor for a desktop machine (quiter than a normal rig with comparable speed), and the tablet/laptop hybrid is awesome for portability (especially the Compaq one, which has the computer behind the screen instead of the keyboard, so there is nothing to produce heat where the machine touches your body).
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Fuel cells also lose most of there capacity within a year (okay, within a month) if used on a daily basis. I'll stick with batteries for long life; the only advantage fuel cells have is energy density.
I've had this sig for three days.
RTFA
The MM10 used Transmeta's older Crusoe processor, which was praised for its miserly power consumption but panned for its performance..............Sharp's tests showed that Efficeon delivers about 1.4 times the performance of Crusoe
Now wash your hands.