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Transmeta to Release Processor in January?
Scipius writes "German tech-mag c't reports that Transmeta's new processor will likely be released on the 19th of January 2000. It also reveals the apparent code name: Crusoe." The article's in German, of course. But we'll take a juicy Transmeta rumor - and that's all this is - in any language. Babelfish time!
*snicker* .. the rumor kitchen. Mahir, head chef of the rumor kitchen, kiss you!
If Transmeta is a fabless chip manufacturer, then this will just be an announcement of what they plan to build. Not that I'm accusing them of vaprware, but early chip announcements tend to be more like bad sci-fi than actual news. Think of Intel and their gHz processor - cooled by a desk sized freezer beneath the unit.
Either way, it will be more interesting than the Lucent (might not be a) router announcement.
Well, yes, we'd kind of known that for some time. :-)
The new-news hidden in this article (apart from the codename itself) is that Crusoe is to be aimed at low-power devices like laptops, which is quite a different market to the mega-workstation many people here wanted it to be (perhaps due to dislike for Intel).
'Course, low-electrical-power doesn't mean low-computing-power. Look at the ARM series, for one. Or c't could be wrong, though they usually aren't. Guess we'll just have to wait and see - to use a phrase already worn out in Transmeta discussion...
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Transmeta's home page has been updated. It is apparently Y2K compliant. Does that mean we can't expect to see it change before next year?
Anyone seen they changed the transmeta website ? :-)
how long has this 'new' site been up
their new design really kicks ass!
never seen a website so well designed, and it works with all browsers and it loads fast too. great! kudos to their webdesigner!
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If it's a processor then some software is going to run on it? This could explained, as mentioned in an article above, why they hired Linus.
:-)
Think about it. A *new* architecture, with some really fancy new characteristics but no software? I don't think so. On the other hand, if they involve the opensource community . . . BINGO! a real competitor to Wintel.
Who else would you choose as youre link to the community but Linus. He's the head of development. He can make sure everything runs on this "Crusoe".
I'm not directly tied into kernel development, but you sometimes wonder why some patches don't get included . . .
But in the end, if it's a processor, Linux will run on it. How else can you have a top-secret processor? Who can they really trust as their OS of choice? Windoze? MacOS? BE? . . .
You never know, kernel 2.4 might as well be ready to run on "Crusoe"
cl
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Reply . . . let's get it over with
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Reply . . . let's get it over with.
In English: The rumor kitchen reports that the geheimnisumwobene processor prozessorschmiede Transmeta on the first Comdex day, to which 15 November -- as announced by Transmeta coworker Linus Torvalds already - admits now finally the date for the conception of their long expected processor to give wants. But already beforehand the message penetrated for c't editorship that was to be introduced the processor circulating under the name " Crusoe " on 19 January 2000 (by the way one Wednesday, no " Friday ").
Crusoe is to direct owing to its very low current consumption primarily at the Notebook market (s/c't)
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
The fact is that if the Transmeta CPU architecture is anything like what's in the Transmeta patents, and if they can at least come up with a few engineering samples, if will mean a radical shift in our ideas about processor design. As it stands, the instruction set is what defines a CPU--CISC, RISC, x86, HP-UX, etc., are all involved in defining the processors which use these instruction sets, but Transmeta changes this. The Transmeta idea as expressed in their patents would create a category above this--no longer is it 'an x86 processor', it's 'a processor running x86 instructions'. This is a radical idea, and a radical paradigm shift--we should all hope it comes to pass. If it's a great and practicable design, it shouldn't be too difficult for Transmeta to partner up with anyone from AMD to Motorola. This sort of radical advancement--again, if it comes to pass--makes me wonder what the heck Intel and all their capital were doing designing the inflexible Itanium, which executes its native (and sure to be poorly supported except for network/server apps for at least a year or two till prices come down remarkably) instructions with Alpha-killing speed but chokes on anything else including the x86 with which they were supposed to be compatible to some reasonable degree. Just 2cents from a guy who plans on supporting anything but the Itanium (mmmm, legacy games under 64-bit AMD....)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
In the short term, it could turn out that the product isn't the fusion-powered anti-gravity time-travel device that all the secrecy has led me to expect.
In the long term, even a fantastic product could end up going nowhere. I'm thinking particularly of AMD's woes. Not only has Intel (allegedly) managed to convince some major motherboard manufacturers not to ship their Athlon boards, now they've gotten a major OEM (Gateway) to drop all AMD processors from their product line. And Intel's anti-trust case inexplicably disappeared into thin air.
Even if Transmeta has the coolest CPU ever, do they stand a chance against Chipzilla? Here's hoping...
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
The comm ent doesn't specify what are its sources, but it: :D ).
:)
1. Confidently states that Crusoe works by special hardware translating the instructions and then storing them in a huge cache,
2. Says that because of that, MS-Windows will probably not run on Crusoe. This is because of Windows' habit of altering its code on the fly for reasons of optimization, and
3. Speculates that Linus was hired because Linux is to be [one of the] first OS[s] to run on Crusoe (ok, so this isn't new
It looks like both Intel and Microsoft are facing Interesting Times...
The name Crusoe could be a suggestion at what the developers think of their new chip. Being seperate from the rest of the manufacturers but close enough that it is still reminiscent of what users are comfortable with.
:-)
A new platform that runs native Linux and without all the flaws and inherited legacy hardware in the INTEL architecture, sounds good to me
This is why Transmeta is absolutely cool. Notwithstanding people that can read German (and I'm sure you're plentiful), we've got a one paragraph article that babelfishes really poorly about some bizarrely unsubstantiated rumors and it's going to be a VERY popular slashdot thread, because, well, because it's Transmeta. (Circular logic... cool).
As for real content, I'm surprised by even the rumor that the supposed chip would be a notebook chip. Why a notebook? Linus has said recently that Linux is likely to develop towards embedded applications (it really does perform well there). How let down would we be if Transmeta's first chips were low powered, linux-powered embedded app chips? Really think TV/Network Computers or the like...
Also, if I read the babeled German correctly, they're going to announce the Concept on Jan. 19th. It still could be sometime before we see product (whatever it may be). This should come as no surprise, since TransMeta clearly hasn't employed hundreds of chip-builders lately (someone would have noticed that, I think).
I'm waiting to be awed by whatever they eventually produce, but for now, it's enough to be in awe of the amazing hype and free-publicity. Amazing, isn't it that doing the exact opposite of Microsoft (by spending NOTHING on advertising) is garnering TransMeta (and thus Linus, and thus Linux) a decent amount of press?
Keep it up TransMeta!
Isn't this going to be capable of becoming a JAVA OS.
If it stores the machine instruction set in a local cache and runs it from there.. Well that seems to be exactly what JAVA would need to have a Java-Chip.
Considering it's low power consumption it would make an excellent candidate for the jini - appliance environment as well as the PC. Add to that the potential JAVA chip concept and you have the Jini Project from Sun sitting in your lap.
My IE 5.0 loads the page 5 MINUTES and then CRASHES! There must be an EMAIL WORM on the page! I think I have to install a SERVICE PACK from BILL!
According to my sources, that processor-related patents are just side-effects of tests of the new caffeinated beverage they're developing...
So Transmeta are finally going to be ready to *say* something. The funny thing is that their patents are quite revealing about what they're up to - a speeded up version of the self-modifying FPGA technology that has occasionally spawned 'new era' claims. I'm not saying that their chip is just an FPGA, but that the effect is meant to be much the same: a metamicrocode that can be optimised in near-real time by a JIT-like (or is dynamic compiler a better term than JIT?) compiler and scheduler.
Please though, don't beleive all the speed hype. Remember, it was a year ago or so when 1GHz sounded astonishing, but now it's almost boring for those chiller guys. The thing is going to be *flexible* not *necessarily* fast.
Curiosity killed the cat, but who ever saw a cat reading a patent application?
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As has been pointed out elsewhere (comp.arch I think), the patents that are available on the net reflect what Transmeta was doing a couple of years ago, when the patents were filed. So don't be sure that they are central to their current plans.
Had anyone else heard the rumor about the Transmeta chip being low power consumpion before? I sure hadn't, and to me, it doesn't mesh well with the idea that it can run multiple instruction sets.
Surely this would require a large amount of memory, and isn't (fast) memory something of a killer for low powered devices?
If Transmeta can produce something that emulates other architectures, and uses a comparable amount of power to the low power versions of those architectures, it has to be one of the most impressive breakthoughs ever.
I do worry though - you know what they say -
Okay, I made up the quote, but I think it is slightly accurate at least, esp. in the early generations of a design.
What else.... Oh yeah.
If they are really going to announce this in January (or at Comdex), I don't think we will see it in use anywhere for a couple of year. If Tranmeta had contracts with fab plants somewhere, someone would have said something by now.
I doubt very much if you can go down to your local chip maker, and say "We want you to switch your plant to making our funcky new designs - forget about this multi-billion dollar contract you have", so they can't just get manufacturing facilities like that. It takes a long time to build a fab plant, too, and it's not like you can just convert a derelic factory to a state of the art chip fabrication plant.
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Targeting at the low-electrical-power market does usually mean that it isn't (yet) competitive in the high-computing-power market. It makes sense to sell your new product into the niche that suits it best, just to get a foothold and some income before you try for a more difficult area. If it can take on the high-power end adequately, there's not a lot of point in restricting it to a particular market segment.
The Arm is reasonably powerful now, but wasn't always : before StrongArm, it was computationally powerful for it's price and wattage, but not really comparable with 486/Pentium.
There are two replies to this article that are rather interesting. Follow the links containing:
No boards (nevertheless!), and faster despite cheaper (x, 11,11,1999)
(Enlish butcherization)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Actually,no. Haven't you noticeda shift over the past few years to putting better technology into notebooks?
Many OEMs (correctly, I think) see notebooks and even desktops derived from notebook technology like Gateway's Profile as the wave of the future. It's likely that conventional "desktop" technology will die off over the next few years.
This will be a good thing - computers will get smaller, quieter, more power-efficient, more flat-panel-ready, and finally, the huge gap between notebook and desktop computing costs should close considerably.
Notebook technology is the future...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
According to netcraft, transmeta runs apache and linux (Who would have guessed ;-) ). But it runs apache 1.1.1! Isn't that risking it a bit, even if there is nothing to hide on that box?
A lot of /.'ers hear "low power" chip and think "laptops." Don't be so limited.
Obviously, low power chips are good for any battery-powered applications: PDAs, cell phones, devices we haven't thought of yet.
Low power chips are also important when you have a lot of them. Say, for the sake of argument, the Transmeta chip is very well suited to parallel processing, maybe massively parallel processing. You'd have a lot of such chips in one box. You'd want low power chips, both to reduce power consumption and to ease the cooling requirements. I presume low power chips also generate less EMF.
For example, along these lines, low power chips are useful in the telecommunications market. I've been associated (loosely) with some hardware that needed to be redesigned to have more fans. One customer was the electric company's third biggest customer in that city (and you've heard of the city and the two bigger customers).
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I'm pretty sure it's just rumor. If they were actually close enough to start constructing the chip itself, they'd have a patent for that. Once all the patents are in order I'll start considering the truth of these rumors.
A good thing???? Yes, just what I want, my cheap, very modular, and easily upgraded system to because an overpriced, very proprietary, stuck with it until I buy a new one because of no real upgradeability system. Forgive me for not agreeing. Yes, desktop computing costs and notebook costs would be more equal. but closer to the notebook side. That is expensive. Let's look at what you've said.
smaller: Ok, I don't see the big deal here really, my tower isn't to big, and I *like* room inside to put whatever I want... Be that, 5 pci cards and 4 harddrives, or load it with fans if I desire....
quieter: Once again, the sound is already negligable on most desktop/towers. The small gain is not, in my opinion worth the cost of swapping to laptop-type technology.
more power-efficient: For the average home user who runs one system, the power the computer is drawing is not an issue. A business might like this, but I still don't think it is worth it.
flat-panel ready: Huh? Ok, I think you may mean one of two things. You could mean the whole system will be in one small, flat panel. In this case this is the exact some poit as "smaller" and I've already addressed it. Or, you may mean flat panel monitors will be supported. Well, this is an absurd notion to think we should change the whole computer architechture for a problem that should be addressed in the video card.
Anyone who wants a very high performance desktop picks and chooses *each* component to get the absolute best in all parts-- soundcard, video card, motherboard, processor, and even the case is scrutinized. If what you suggest were to come to fruition, all of this power is lost. We would be stuck with what dell, gateway, compaq, or whomever threw together in an attempt to get our business. I have never once been impressed with a large company predesigned computer, and I don't want to be forced to have one.
The Linux connection (strongly hinted at by Jim Collas, former President of Gateway's Amiga division, when I spoke to him about the various AmigaNG rumors) is, of course, Linus himself. But the coolness factor is this: here we have a CPU, running emulated instructions as fast as some version of the Pentium II/III, and doing it cheaper and with much less power. Only the first one is new work -- it's easy to find CPUs that run faster than PII/IIIs using less power (PowerPC, for example). The thing is, the x86 code runs at 1/2 or so of the native Transmeta CPU core speed, perhaps based on the limits of their dynamic recompiler, the loss of abstraction in binary code, etc. What about native code?
The modern trick in all this, same thing Sun's doing with MAJC, is to make the idea of a VLIW processor legit by never tying a system to native binaries. You run x86 or Java Byte Code or whatever through a translator, and when the machine architecture, and thus instruction set, change, you build a new translator, everything's hunky-dorey code wise, and you get to forget entirely about hardware legacy. But Linux and other open source stuff doesn't have a binary legacy problem, period. So there's no problem in coding Linux native, and if you did this, Linux would run twice as fast, relatively, as any closed source OS on this platform. The need for Linus on this would be building a mixed code manager for Linux, so that the kernel could cooperate actively with the dynamic translator and run your choice of x86, native, or other code modules (full-speed Java, etc).
This is the last layer of HW abstration. Some day, all CPUs may be built this way.
-Dave Haynie
Absolute nonsense. These are two diferent authors - Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe.
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OK, just notice you're from Canada. You're forgiven, my son. Being from Canada is a good excuse
Grunt. Oink, oink.
OK, let me have a shot at this....
;-)
Smaller: My case is ~2.5 feet tall, and is mostly empty (but useful) space.
Quieter: 11 fans and 2 hds do not a quite computer make.
blah blah blah....
Anyway, you're missing the point. In fact, you're so far from the point I had to hike out to send this.
PC's were in the same position a few years ago that you claim notebooks are in now. They were expensive, proprietary, difficult or impossible to upgrade, etc. Guess what? Things change. Now their (fairly) cheap, (mostly) open and (relatively) easy to upgrade. The same will come to pass in notebook tech as it migrates to the desktop. People will demand that their waffle sized computer have slots for their shiny new NV11, and some company will comply. Then they'll want to be able to upgrade processors, and another company will comply. And so on. If you're still looking for over-priced lock-ins, try the workstation market.
Anyway, you can't stop it; the lower-end of the market demands it. The iMac is a laptop (Powerbook mobo's, etc) in a big colorful case, and people love it. Some are starting to complain about the limited upgrade path (i.e., none), and hopefully Apple will do something about that. The reason they're doing so well is that most people don't care about proprietariness; they want a computer that works, without having to know anything about it. That is what this tech will give them (though it's not really at any advantage over the current systems in this). However, this does not mean that we will *all* be using iMac's (see above paragraph).
So, in five years, you'll see basically what you do now. Compaq, Gateway, Apple, etc. selling all-in-one miniPC's for the average consumer, while those of use with more refined tastes will order our Abit mobo's and Transmeta processors and slap together monstrously overpowered notebooks. I fail to see the downside. (Esp. if I can get dual processors, firewire and an NV1x in something I can take to LANparties in a backpack.