Slashdot Mirror
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. -
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.
Seriously, though, this practice shouldn't be rewarded with more free publicity for these products or their "reviews".
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Since Linus Torvalds used to work for Transmeta, I would like to know if Linux is well optimized for this processor.
...a laptop with a dedicated "portable" architecture. I can definately see Intel saying "More transistors, more power, more clock, and it'll be okay" - which is questionable on the desktop but not at all adequate with laptops. Transmeta's departure from this is an interesting turn of events - Will we see two separate processor lines, one for the laptop, and one for the desktop? And I don't mean the M-series, which just added variable clock and PM, but something like two different design philosophies.
:)
And damn, that's a sexy laptop...
toresbe
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.
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***
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.
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.
*cough*Linus Torvalds*cough*
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."
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
Their first chip Crusoe, although saving power, underperformed badly. And the Efficeon doesn't look fast compared to its rivals. The Efficeon TM 8000 can do 1.1GHz consuming 7W. Intel's Pentium M does 1.7GHz for the same power consumption.
I don't think there's anything particularly cool about this news. It is the same as the discovery of the new planet. There are better ones already out there.
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
Of course both fans spinning will impact your battery performance but it's better than third degree burns on your... lap.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
As far as I'm concerned (and lots of people I know as well), the magic price point for notebooks financed from personal funds has become $1000 or less. After all, these are machines that are often "refreshed" every two years or less, I definitely don't want to spend much more than $500/year on notebooks. This Sharp is only giving me a slow processor, XGA and 20GB for $1500? Heck, I can get the ultra-slim Averatec 3150 for $900 (often for $700 refurbished), and it's got twice the HD and a faster mobile AMD to boot. Given that the backlight eats most of the power anyway, I doubt this Sharp will run all that much longer on a charge than the Averatec, Transmeta or no Transmeta.
Really, why is this even slightly +5 Interesting? Fair enough that you love the company...they did employ Linus for a while after all, and this is Slashdot, so I guess that counts for something. But Transmeta is nothing more than a hyped up dot.com remnant that hasn't realised that it should have crawled away and died somewhere a few years ago. Transmeta overpromised and underdelivered. Its CPUs have never really carved out a niche, suffering from terrible performance, and negligible gains in power efficiency over mobile designs from Motorola, Intel and AMD. Too underpowered for a mainstream notebook, and too power hungry for a PDA or cellphone, Transmeta CPUs linger on in a kind of zombie state, appearing from time to time in strange Japanese systems like this Sharp Actius, itself nothing more than a pale imitation of an Apple 12" G4 PowerBook.
You're entitled to your opinion. It's just -1, Clueless Linus Fanboy, not +5, Interesting.
Thank you.
Somehow Transmeta will always have a warm place in my heart.
And Intel will always have a warm place in my lap.
Seriously, though.... The new IBM X40 is only 2.7 lbs with approximately the same battery life. The Transmeta only looks good until one realizes that it has a tiny 10" monitor.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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)
Anyone know / care to comment how these chips compare with apples G3 and G4 laptops? I was under the impression that they were much less power hungry than intel and AMD's chips, which let them be lighter and have better battery life.
I have a feeling the guy writing the summary was blazingly high.
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.
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.
Obviously someone who's not used the Transmeta based Compaq Tablet. About as blazingly fast as a shackled tortoise. It does have great power consumption stats though :)
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 ----
Transmeta CPUs linger on in a kind of zombie state
I can just see the advertisment department going crazy with this. "When there's no more room in Hell, Transmeta will crawl the earth."
Just doesn't sound as good if it's not a Dead film.
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.
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?
lemme check the calendar to make sure it aint april 1st.
Indeed, transmetas have an extremely low power-consumption rate, but one can't say they are fast, especially post-Enron; u can't fudge the numbers. If power consumption was a part of the performance index (let's say for a SpecInt or a SpecFP), then yea...it might be able to compete. But it's like Via's C3; its low power in more than one way.
Just like you can't have a Lamborgini that gets 60MPG, you ccan't expect to have low power with high power; only some balance of the two in between.
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.
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.
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.
It's known for that Torvalds kid that worked there
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
Tansmeta's do have their fans. But rather than being little devices that go round and round inside the case, these fans keep the air circulating by incessantly praising the processor in their new notebook to anyone who will listen.
And they're not silent at all!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I know it is one of their big selling points but I have yet to have used a Transmeta device that actually had a longer run time than my huge Latitude C series with second battery. Why? Because for some reason manufacturers seem to have a fetish for the 2.5 - 3 hour benchmark. Once they reach it, they concentrate on size instead. Surely I can't be the only one who would be happy with a smallish (12-13") notebook with long battery life. I certainly find that more interesting than devices that are so tiny as to be unusable yet have comparable run time to normal laptops.
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?
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.