Transmeta Still Has A Lot To Prove
The Age
Tuesday April 17, 2001
TAKE the poster child of the open-source rebellion, a company noted for paranoid secrecy to rival the Illuminatus, and a prominent semiconductor developer, and you have a bona fide enigma.
Even before it lifted the veil in January last year, Transmeta - a combination of Latin and Ancient Greek words meaning "Across and Among" - was the hottest startup since Hewlett-Packard.
Keeping mum had guaranteed Transmeta would not need to spend a cent on marketing. In Silicon Valley, where an obnoxious in-your-face attitude is a virtue, if you are quiet you must be doing something interesting. If you are totally paranoid, that thing must be, to quote Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, insanely great.
What Transmeta was working on was Crusoe, a new generation of processors that would, it said, spur greater innovation in portables and servers. Crusoe is a fast, Intel x86-compatible processor that draws less power and thus gives off less heat. Portables will run longer between recharges and servers will stay cooler, Transmeta claims.
Transmeta was formed in 1995 by David Ditzel, former Sun technical officer and director of SPARC Labs, which developed the Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) chip of the same name. Ditzel is Transmeta's vice-chairman and chief technology officer.
In the past 15 months, Crusoes have appeared in devices from mostly Japanese consumer electronics companies. They include Casio, NEC, Philips, Gateway, Hitachi, Fujitsu and Sony, which released the first Transmeta device, a Vaio handheld, last September. The Vaio is available in Australia but Sony would not comment on its progress here.
More recently, server makers such as FiberCycle and RLX Technologies have exploited Crusoe's low-power capability. Their developments are buoyed by the ongoing power crisis that has crippled California and long-standing environmental concerns in Europe.
Rumors surrounding the secretive five-year attempt to develop a chip to rock Intel's dominance were fuelled following Transmeta's filings with the US Patent Office in 1998 and 1999. Adding to its difficulties in keeping a lid on progress at its Santa Clara headquarters was the elevation of Linus Torvalds, Linux creator and software megastar, to its stable of developers. To add spice, one of the main investors was Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
Why was Torvalds, open-source fugleman, bedding down with the Evil Empire? Conspiracy buffs theorised that Allen was working with fellow Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to subvert Linux, the first real threat to Windows' dominance in operating systems. Transmeta, they said, was a shrewd front.
"Where do people find these rumors?" Torvalds asked in a Usenet post in 1998.
Transmeta and Microsoft announced last month that Crusoe would be used in the next generation of Windows XP-powered handhelds, the Tablet PC. The Tablet PC is not a PC companion, in the same vein as a Webpad, but a self-contained PC replacement, it said.
The Crusoe-equipped Tablet PC will be a "great platform" for Microsoft's forthcoming .NET vision, according to the software behemoth's Tablet PC general manager Alaxandra Loeb.
TRANSMETA'S success hinges on its Code Morphing Software, which mimics Intel's industry dominant Pentium x86 architecture. Crusoe's instruction set, or core programming, is instituted in software and not with transistors. Emulation, as it is called, is a technique common in computing.
It is used in the Java Virtual Machine (VM), MAME coin-op emulator and WAP emulators that display mobile-phone extended SMS services on a PC. But no one had implemented emulation on the scale Transmeta envisaged.
But emulation in software, as anyone who has downloaded a page running a Java application can attest, slows silicon. How would Transmeta manage the difficult task of providing true emulation - which incidentally did not infringe Intel's intellectual property - without draining cycles or amps while delivering competitive speed?
Because Torvalds was on the team, there had to be a Linux angle. During many appearances at conventions and in public posts to newsgroups, he was always tight-lipped about the company's activities.
Last month, Transmeta released the source code to its Linux implementation, Midori, under the General Public Licence. The name, which is Japanese for ``green", reflects Transmeta's insistence that Crusoe is an environmentally friendly technology. When it announced the open source project, the company emphasised that Crusoe and Midori were suitable for a range of applications, not just its forte in handhelds. It pointed to Gateway-AOL's desktop Connected TouchPad, a fanless desktop-cum-portable Web tablet. Giving the code to anyone to extend as they pleased would lead to faster adoption.
Crusoe achieves its low power by replacing transistors with software code. The hardware is a 128-bit Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) CPU enveloped by a software layer that provides the framework for processing. The hybrid benefits from faster debugging and ready updates, problems that plagued successive Intel Pentiums. But it could also lead to a nagging problem common to all software - the inclination to push code out the door to meet deadlines, even when it is not ready.
Transmeta's approach also makes possible its ``LongRun" power management, delivering better battery life. This is because it ``analyses the application workload dynamically and continuously adjusts the processor's voltage and speed to provide the required performance at the lowest power", Transmeta says. Notebook makers are boasting of doubled battery life of 11 hours.
But Transmeta is not without its critics. Using industry standard benchmarks, reviewers have found Crusoe-equipped devices perform poorly against their Intel counterparts. Intel also charges that its devices run faster, longer and cooler than those with rival Transmeta chips.
Hardware writer Darren Yates will report his full findings on the Fujitsu Lifebook P-1000, one of the first implementations of the Transmeta Crusoe chip, in the June issue of Australian PC User. Yates also wrote a review for I.T.2 last week.
PC User editor John Hilvert said Yates found the Transmeta Crusoe TM5400, running at a claimed 533MHz, would only just match that of a 400MHz Intel budget chip. The Crusoe's code-morphing drags its performance well below that of its 533MHz rating, Hilvert said.
``Basically, the P-1000 notebook is a pretty good little design," Yates said. ``It's unusual and a nice cross between Toshy's (Toshiba's) old Libretto and, say, a Portege.
``The chip, on the other hand, is pretty down on overall performance compared to similar notebooks. Based on my P-1000 tests, in that configuration, the Transmeta Crusoe chip will struggle to match a 400MHz Celeron in performance."
Transmeta spokesman Frank Priscaro countered that existing benchmarks don't take into account the peculiar Crusoe architecture. He said BatteryMark tests, which compare one processor against another taking into account battery life, only test the Intel Pentium at 80 per cent idle, so it is mostly inactive. Not a real-world scenario, he said.
``We don't do well on benchmarks because with a software processor the software translates instructions for the operating system and applications to this piece of the hardware (the Crusoe)," Priscaro said.
``The first time the system comes online, the code morphing software sees where it can economise. But when you run benchmarks, it looks slow because the benchmarks are written for a different architecture."
Transmeta will release its own benchmarks, he said. According to Yates, such benchmarks would be unreliable because they would not be independent.
``It's really about how we're going to measure desirability of these systems, and megahertz isn't the only measurement," Priscaro said.
``It's like measuring the desirability of an automobile by testing how fast it goes."
``If it's any consolation, these are the same tests that failed to detect any substantial performance improvement with the first Pentium 4 systems," said PC User's Hilvert.
``These are also the same benchmarks that explain why there is such public interest in the high performing, aggressively priced AMD Duron chips."
An under-appreciated benefit of low power consumption is in high-performance server clusters. The California power crisis, in which a supply shortage has led to state-wide blackouts in the past six months, focused attention on the power requirements of data centres.
RLX Technologies co-founder Chris Hipp said Crusoe provides superior performance at lower energy consumption. The Houston, Texas, company sells the Razor - lots of servers on a single replaceable plug-in card.
``Crusoe gave us a level of density that we could not get with any other processor," Hipp said.
``The reality is that the consumer is price sensitive and performance sensitive," Hilvert said. ``Despite some tweaks on energy savings, CPUs have become a commodity. If the Transmeta chip cannot compete on performance on mainstream platforms, it will have to discount its offering to be taken seriously."
LINKS
www.transmeta.com
The Chips
THERE are two Crusoe chip strands: The TM5x00 series for lightweight notebooks running Windows and the TM3x00 for Internet appliances running Midori.
The 0.18 micron TM5400 and TM5600 at 500-700hz (256KB L2 cache) and 600-800MHz (512KB L2 cache), respectively, are available. The 0.22 micron TM3200 with 96KB L1 cache for Linux Net appliances is available.
A 0.13 micron TM5800 at 700 MHz (1MB L2 cache) will be available later this year as will be a TM3300 at 400MHz (128KB L1 cache) and TM3400 at 500MHZ (512KB L2 cache), both using 0.18 micron fabrication.
© 2001 The Age
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