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Transmeta in 1999
Petergun sent
us another
Transmeta story which does not reveal much new, but provides
a nice summary of last year's events.
Brian Neal appears to believe that 1999 will be Transmeta's
year.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
:)
Transmeta was a lot cooler when we didn't know what they're up to. Wild rumours abounded about Linus, reverse engineered alien technology, etc. Now it's just another maker of RISC chips. Yawn.
"...Another possibility is that Transmeta will market such a product directly to the end user, selling OEMs and VARs a chip that can run anything and everything..."
Can anyone out there explain the chip subsystems enough to explain how a single chip can run multiple instruction sets? My background is mechanical engineering so I'm rather ignorant on the subject. Would this chip actually be wired to convert x86 instructions AND PowerPC instructions AND UNIX instructions, etc, etc, or is there some other way that it would be done? Is that claim that it will run "anything and everything" an exaggeration? Just curious...
I think transmeta is just alot of hype and vaporware that will never get off the ground. Maybe they have alot of good ideas. There are many ideas that sound really good and in 6 months nobody hears from them again. Let's see some action-not hype and wild claims
Why not just create a Standard set of instructions
that any chip would be able to process. You could
also expand this into a set of standard inturrupts
in order to control hardware and therefore code
in assembler would be portable. Come to think of it, if you can get assembler portable then 'C' and
pretty much all flavours of programming languages
could be portable.
-kojak
Wasn't one of the ideas behind RISC to be gone with microcode? So it would be more like an FX!32 in hardware, then.
it's called Intel x86 and there are a number of ;)
companies that make chips for it
Some of the hype is, I'm sure, completely false.
But trust me on this - you'll be seeing Transmeta soon. And you'll be impressed.
;)
There seems to have been some confusion about Transmeta. Transmeta is actually much more than a yet another single chip maker. It is the Second Foundation.
... Many other innovatives aspect of the Design would be worth of been described, but the margin of this form is to small, to continue, but remember this: the Free Design Foundation is about an unified consistent design of all the aspects of the computer hardware and software basis.
Put this way, this is rather unlightening ; here is the context: we all know about the first Foundation, the Free Software Foundation (which is actually the Free Source Code Foundation). Now someone saw that an impressive amount of geeks was now able to communicate through Internet, and concluded that the bottleneck was no longer the source code, but nowadays the design and documentation of the design. A good example is gcc: while this is (one of) the most useful product of the First Foundation, it is notably hard to modify, and has uncomplete top-level and general documentation about its internals (RTLs aren't enough); a better example is emacs: the design is far from perfect since the Lisp engine should have been usable as a standalone module, while it is currently closely coupled with the core editor functions (and vice-versa).
The person then decided to start the Second Foundation: the Free Design Foundation. Its purpose is to hire some of the brightest persons, to produce with state-of-the-art designs, document them and release them to the geek community. This foundation is called "Transmeta".
The astonishing lack of progress of the design of popular commercial languages, compilers, OSes, GUIs, and applications, left and will leave, a long time this project before it will need to be fully revealed. On the contrary, releasing nowadays progressively Free Designs, would only have led to their progressive implementation by commercial vendors. What Transmeta has planned instead, is to release on 1st january 2000 (or 1st Jan 2001, depending of the advancement of its various projects), a set of consistent, high quality designs, for micro-processors, languages, OS, and Internet applications, expecting to initiate a massive free software coding party, which will result with a durable (eternal) and indiscutable basis for all the software systems in the future. The microprocessors and OSes will cover the range from embedded systems (watches) to mainframes (albeit progressively), but the more important part of the Grand Design is that they will fully interoperate with the Air.
The Air will be a worldwide ring of free Air Servers: the mail, the news, the storage of public document/source code, the execution of publicly useful programs, will no longer need to be run by private machines, could be stored/done (at the user discretion) on Air Servers, thus doing a single unification of file servers, push-media, WWW, agents, usenet, slashdot,... It is intended that all Free Code will be distributed on the Air ; most bugs will be instantly be reported to the closest server (to support this feature, wrappers will need to be first developped for Free Source Code programs, programs written in simplistic languages, or for programs working on limited processors/OSes): each program will be roughly separated in a set of modules (libraries/classes), with for each module, several implementations running in parallel with also self-consistency checks for most of the code. Naturally software will be automatically downloaded, compiled, and/or remotely run.
-- Anonymous
This post bears a striking resemblence to those of a fanatic some of you may remember...
Perhaps we should build shrines to the great Gods of Transmeta in order to increase our Air useage allowance?
;-)
really... all that talk of 'world domination' from linus isnt just talk, he's werking with 'them'. i could show you but first sign this NDA....
I hear that most of the top CPU manufacturers are supporting it.
Now it's just another maker of RISC chips.
RISC *is* alien technology.
...before you become a danger to yourself and others.
...in this message.
Transmeta is not hype or Vaporware. It is a company that has not said what it is doing, but because they have Linus Et Al working there everyone is speculating like mad.
--Zachary Kessin
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I can't think of anybody "just out of college" who works here. There are some right out of grad school, but most are veteran engineers. None were involved in "theoretical computer science".
__
Scott Draves
I think the inference being drawn from the patent is that the chip wouldn't run multiple instruction sets. It would run one instruction set, but some of the software running on it could read machine code in some instruction set and write out "equivalent" code in the chip's native instruction set.
The patent discusses some modifications to the hardware to help this process out; however, that help doesn't include directly executing the instructions.
There aren't any "UNIX instructions"; various UNIX-flavored operating systems run on machines that use various different processors. For example, Linux runs on PCs with processors that run x86 instructions. PowerPC machines, Alpha machines, etc. - and some other UNIX-flavored OSes run on Crays, IBM mainframes, etc..
As per the above, the software running on the chip could, conceivably, translate x86 code or PowerPC code or... into native code and run it; some of the hardware assistance appears as if it might be intended to allow even operating system kernel code, which may refer to I/O devices in a fashion similar to the way it refers to memory, to be translated and run, so it might be that a system with PC-like peripherals, and a chip that implements the invention described in the patent, running software that can translate, say, x86 machine code, could run an operating system intended for an x86-based PC, whether it be Windows 9x, the x86 version of Windows NT, the x86 version of Linux, the x86 version of Solaris 2.x, the x86 version of BeOS, etc..
I think the claim that it might be "a chip that can run anything and everything" is a bit extreme - most chips can't, by themselves, run much of anything, as they need additional chips to connect the CPU chip to memory, an I/O bus, etc., so if you built a system with such a chip and a Mac-like set of peripheral chips, it might not be able to run an operating system for an x86-based PC, as some of the "support chips" might be different.
If the operating system running on the system containing that chip included code to emulate a foreign operating system, it might be possible to run applications for an operating system for machines with a different processor chip, e.g. a Linux machine with that chip and some kind of MacOS emulator, plus software to translate 68K or PowerPC code to native code, might be able to run MacOS applications, as well as native Linux x86 applications if the software also included stuff to translate x86 code to native code.
...if your processor is microcoded. Plenty of processors aren't micrcoded, and even some that are run many instructions in hardware (e.g., I have the impression that all Intel x86 processors, starting with the 486, do many of the common instructions directly in hardware).
...except when it isn't. Some machines in the past have had loadable microcode; in addition to machines intended to e.g. have different microcode loaded to implement different instruction sets, and those that had the ability to load microcode to implement new instructions, a number of them, such as, I think, many later IBM System/3xx mainframes, loaded microcode from e.g. a floppy disk (I think the 8" floppy may originally have been developed by IBM as a device from which to load S/370 microcode).
I don't. If the patent they got reflects what they're currently planning on doing, they appear to be creating a processor that probably has only one instruction set, but has some amount of hardware features to make life a bit easier for software that translates code from other instruction sets to its native instruction set and then executes that code.
I suspect he doesn't but, even if he does, what byte-coded languages are you thinking of? Java? Guess that makes MacOS, OS/400, Windows, etc. "UNIX-like". Perl? Gee, I have the impression that'd make Windows, possibly MacOS, possibly others "UNIX-like".
I've not seen anything to lead me to think of languages that get compiled into interpreted byte-codes as being a particularly UNIX-specific language.
Neither have I (I don't know what JavaOS, or whatever it's called these days, looks like, but I suspect it's not "UNIX-like" in the sense of having its core API look A Lot Like That Of UNIX).
I wasn't saying that either Java or Perl were used to make such an OS; I was saying that Java and Perl (definitely Java, and I think Perl as well) compile into a byte-coded language,but neither of them are UNIX-specific, so neither of them count as the sort of language whose byte codes could reasonably be called "UNIX instructions".
Isnt Transmeta supposed to be the MMC (multimedia processor) supplier
for Gateway/Amiga inc next. gen Amiga along with QNX who are supplying
their neutrino OS core (posix/unix)??????
Alan Day - Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland, UK
Break the boundary between platforms: Java promised this via software,now Transmeta by hardware?
As President Clinton said to Wolf Blitzer
"Your Good, Real Good."
The patent is somewhat of a red herring as any method for determining whether a physical address is memory or MMIO could be better used to determine whether an address resides in local memory or in shared memory in a multiple-processor system. This would be a much more useful application of this technology!
Transmeta is almost certainly working on a CPU that supports parallel processing very well (I beleive that Linus was hired for his experience with SMP). Probably using both large on-chip cache memory and large shared memory address space. I would assume that scalability up to massively parallel would also be a design goal. To make this chip useful, they also need a compiler that can generate code to take advantage of parallel processors.
Transmeta may or may not be working on emulating existing CPUs and OSes. The way to emulate an existing CPU is not by changing your microcode, but rather by using the type of technology used in Java JIT compilers. Instead of just translating Java byte code to native machine language, this could be extended to also translate X86, 68000, or PowerPC instructions on an on-demand basis into the new CPU's native instructions. If the JIT compiler also knew how to parallelize the tasks very well, it would then be possible to emulate older processors in faster-than-real-time by using parallel processors! But to really make this useful, you also have to emulate the run time environment, e.g. Linux, Windows, or MacOS. Net result would be a machine that could simultaneously run applications written for different operating systems and CPUs. Way cool, if you can get it to work! As a minimum, I would expect at least Java to be supported in the first release, as this immediately gives you loads of applications for the new chip.
Disclaimer: I am not privy to any inside information about Transmeta, and probably know less about this than you do! However, I would appreciate any feedback you can give me on how likely/unlikely my speculation is to be true.
Question: Does anybody know of any research done on the parallelizability of Java byte code, and if so, where are the researchers now?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
;-)
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney