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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."
I thought these chips were supposed to have "good" performance while consuming a lot less power.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Somehow Transmeta will always have a warm place in my heart. Don't know why, but I really like the company and praise them for what they are trying to do.
:)
1 Ghz is not that fast, but for normal work, it's more than enough.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
& wi-fi vdo conferencing, etc....
Since Linus Torvalds used to work for Transmeta, I would like to know if Linux is well optimized for this processor.
I first expected it to be some kind of super Zaurus but no...
it just seems to be some bigger Vaio C1xx.
Now, I do not see who they want to sell this to if this at least present no consistency with the rest of their offer.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
How does this chip compare with that other energy-saving chip, the Celeron?
And more importantly, is there any reason you'd choose a Transmeta-powered rig over an Intel one?
Patriotism - the last resort of scoundrels.
The CPU is just one component that eats electricity in a laptop; the other big hog is the back lit screen.
Do you really need much compute power in a walk-about machine to do email, web browsing, word smithing ? In a trade off give me battery time over machine horsepower every time.
I think that many people have a laptop for ease of use (all your files not backed up in one place that moves with you) and expect the laptop to do everything. What I like is those laptops that drop performance in battery mode.
There's no reference to blazingly high clock speeds, just computing speeds. Remember clock speed!=compute speed.
I don't know what everybody is complaining about with these being slow chips. THey should really start to look at the trade-offs. Do they want to lug around an 8 pound laptop, with 3 hourse of battery life, just so they can say they have a 2.4 GHz laptop, or would they rather carry around a 2.6 pound laptop with 6 hours of battery life (weight with extended battery), and have to run things just a tinsy bit slower. I've found that provided the system have a good amount of memory, a pentium 2 is good enough to run most applications.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The benchmark is of a TM5600 Crusoe against a VIA. I can tell you that the TM5800 933 MHz is faster than the Via at 1GHz and the Efficeon is even faster than that.
Maybe Transmeta used to be a little slower, but not anymore. The Efficeon can keep up with the Pentium M
and the new 90nm Efficeons will be even faster with higher clock speeds.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Thats not strictly true.. On a speed/watt basis, efficeons are by far the best. It also depends on what ur doing.. The VLIW architecture auto optimises, so some things will run very well on efficeons (and they get faster as they run).. Also, unlike the intel and AMD mobile processors, efficeons aren't just some hacked up processor designed for something else.. The 3 hours of computing on even the centrino's isn't great when u consider that the transmeta's last about 12 hours, and chances are u wont use ur laptop to play doom3 either
He is right though.. the efficeons are fast.. not as fast as the pentium-m's or mobile AMD's, but a very decent speed, gets faster as it runs and awesome battery life make transmeta processors a very good choice..
Could be wrong, but transmeta's I think dont need fans, so they are also very silent.
People should remember that the future of computers is clustered CPU's (like openmosix) and wireless, to share CPU power, so in that point of time u wont need much CPU (cause u will just leech it off other computers on the wireless network if u need it) and when that happens, the only reason why the CPU will matter is for when u aren't connected to a network... still, 1GHZ, or more processing power is definately sufficient (my laptop only has 850 P3, which I'm surviving off easily, even with gentoo). Its no athlon 64 FX, but honestly, if u need that kind of power just buy a workstation...
But variable clock and power management has been around in Intel's chips since the mobile Pentium III's and 4's.
The Pentium M is a very low voltage chip that manages to achieve relatively high clock speeds (difficult to do with low voltage). And since it's a modified Pentium III, it can outperform the mobile Pentium 4 counterparts handily.
So, while you may be right that the Pentium M is not a complete redesign, it does have significant technology to make it low power. Sometimes that best bet to a successful product is to modify existing proven technology, not start from scratch. I think Intel has done a commendable job in this regard.
I have been looking at the MM10 (the older version) as a small Linux computer for some months now and the memory was always a hold up. This things solves that and then some.
The older model was small and light, but very usable. You could confortably hold it in one hand for a long time and it never got warm/hot. This was the thinnest thing I've ever seen, and the smallest without seeming to sacrifice on usability (close to sacrifice though).
I might just have get one and see about running Linux on this little guy.
I very much doubt your Pentium M numbers. Why else would e.g. Samsung need to permanently activate the cooling fan on its Pentium M notebooks when running without battery, whereas the Efficeon doesn't even need a fan.
And saying just because the TM5600 (oldest Crusoe) was slow the Efficeon is also slow, is like saying just because the K-6 was slow the Athlon64 is also slow.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Using a wireless network as the backbone for a cluster seems to me to be inefficient, at least right now.
Sure, you've got a lot of power available, but your latency is going to be pretty bad. And your reliability, especially in buildings with a lot of concrete. I don't know how well OpenMOSIX handles faults.
On another note, what happens to a wireless network when you put a whole bunch of computers in the same room? Which will be more important? The number of channels, or the bandwidth per channel?
Again, I don't know how OpenMOSIX would react.
Of course, it is an interesting idea, even if it needs work. Perhaps incorporating mesh network logic with signal strength sensing would improve the behavior of the system.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Transmeta made a lot of fuss about energy efficiency, but in reality, the Intel LV and ULV mobile Tualatin P3 consumes almost as little power while being much faster. The best power/speed tradeoff seems to be the ULV P3 933mhz, 512kb L2 cache, 1.1V. The typical and maximum power consumption are 4 and 7W respectively.
Intel is now hyping the P-M just as heavily as Transmeta. The P-M can dynamically scale the frequency through a large range, but if you use CPU intensive apps, the power consumption can get suprisingly high (31W for the 1.5-1.7 ghz versions). For more facts and figures, see Sandpile.
I have an earlier model Fujitsu Lifebook P-2000 with the crusoe chip thats clocked at 933 mhz. I can say that while the system is not the fastest its great for anything on the go. The battery life is insane I've used it for 5+ hours suspended it, tossed it in my back pack for three days and gotten another hour or two easily out of it. I use it in class for notes and casual browsing as well as some coding from time to time. Gaming is out of the question as well as anything graphically intensive however it is good to watch DVD movies on while working workstations in my office. (Grad student) The 10.4 screen isn't bad at all, but it does take some getting used to. However my model is widescreen so that might make all the difference. I would not describe it as blazing fast at all but I've got it dual booting linux and windows with no problems and it is snappy on both.
The human condition is to not accept the human condition.
And if so, can i change the emulation to lets say.. a PPC, or even a Z80?
Or is that locked down to a microcode level and not 'user accessable'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Jesus the top one in that article got my attention ... that's real, real nice.
http://www.oqo.com/hardware/specs/
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I agree, as I own a P2120B and a NetWinder 3300, but even Fujitsu switched the P Series to Intel processors.
I helped develop a Crusoe based product, the NetWinder 3xxx series. It took a LOT of effort to before we saw 86 on the debug port (86 is the code for when the Crusoe processor is finally executing CMS and is ready to execute x86 instructions). It was so monumental a moment and effort that we took pictures.
A NetWinder 3300 powers my website. Along with the DSL modem, the UPS lasts over 2 hours with the 30 Watt peak power draw (15 Watts each).
I've heard that Crusoe processors tend to do well on relatively compact computing tasks, like CPU-heavy numerical analysis in which a relatively small bit of code is run repeatedly-- a bit that's small enough to fit into the instruction translation cache. One interesting thing that I've noticed is that, compared to most applications, OpenOffice seems to run quite nicely on my P1120. Perhaps that's because the JVM (or its most frequently used subset) is small enough to stay in the translation cache? I'm just guessing, here... more informed insight is welcome.
The extended battery really does last almost 9 hours if you're not using WiFi-- e.g., on a flight. I still had 48% battery remaining after constant use on a 5-hour Orlando-to-LA flight last summer. My WiFi use is mostly at home, and it's still decent-- though I haven't tried to measure it. (Interestingly enough, the biggest battery hog seems to be the tiny DLink USB Bluetooth adapter that I use to sync my cell phone!)
On the other hand, I effectively lose some of my performance on airplanes, due to everyone around me saying, "What the heck is that thing? Aww, how cute..." Then they realize that their Dell laptop's extended battery is almost as big as my whole rig. :-)
FWIW, my P1120 doesn't appear to have a fan or a vent. And I can actually place it on my lap for a while; it gets warm, but not too hot.
Obligatory Linux content: I haven't tried loading Linux on it yet, because as far as I can tell, there is no available touch screen calibration utility. (The screen itself reportedly shows up as a generic USB pointing device.) Anyone know of a solution for this?
When will transmeta come out with a Mini-ITX or Nano-ITX board with ther CPU on it? VIA has done very well at that with its C3 processors. They sell a lot to end-users, and sell a ton to embedded systems vendors. Transmeta could get a piece of that market.
Those server/embedded devices are a lot less demanding of CPU power. Any device, like a laptop, which has direct user GUI interfacing will always need a lot of horsepower.
Contrary to the other replier, I have a 15" G4 Powerbook (TiBook) and I still get a little over 4 hours on the battery if I turn down my screen a little bit (still very readable). I would also like to mention that my powerbook is over a year old now and it got more than 4.5 hours when it was new.
As for the newer powerbooks, I can't say how they compare, but its probably pretty close to 4.5 hours if that is what Apple claims. The 17" powerbook has a bigger battery and so it should last about the same as the 15" while the 12" lasts longer at over 5 hours (my friend's would last about 5.5 hours).
As for the G3 laptops.....those are old stuff man. Apple stopped selling them so I can't even check on the specs for you.
As far as the heat issues go, I can heat up my lap if I (simultaneously):
1. Tell Mathematica to sum a series from 1 to 100 with many factorials and an infinte sum inside.
2. Burn a DVD.
3. Read slashdot over a wireless connection in addition to being on IM, other standard things, etc.
But I still won't get anything near the 2nd degree burns you get with my dad's P4 2.4 GHz Toshiba.
In other words, I love my powerbook. =)
-Scott