[ILUG] [OT] Transmeta

[John P. Looney]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2000 at 06:49:40PM +0000, Donncha O Caoimh mentioned:
> I was listening to the radio version.
> it'll be available on the zdnet site somewhere later on. Summaries? look
> at any news site tomorrow I guess :)
> 
> Some "facts"
> laptops could run for weeks on a special power saver mode.
> 700Mhz laptops will run all day without a battery recharge.
> apps will run just as fast on it as they do on x86..
> It'll run a lot cooler and be more intelligent about power saving. (he
> explained a bit more but it's all a bit fuzzy)

 They were demoing 400Mhz versions, but hope to have the production models
running 700Mhz in June. IBM are converting one of their running plants to
produce the Crusoe chips. They are also writing the BIOS, the Linux and
Windows ports (mentioned little about MacOS, bar that it was "possible" to
get it running on a Crusoe), and all the software that does the X86 or
PowerPC translation is done by Transmeta too.

 They also said that they could have very small, low power (Palm Pilot
type devices) with the same functionality as laptops, just that they would
have to run slower. Also, you could set your machine to run in "low power
mode", it could set a limit to the Max CPU speed of your CPU. I dunno can
they do the same with the whole bus though. There is a neat "The machine
isn't doing anything. Setting CPU speed to 10Mhz" type of thing. And, as
anyone that remembers that "as you double CPU speed, you square power
consumption will tell you", that means good things for laptops & portable
devices. I think they also said in a few years time, 50% of their revenue
would come from "internet appliances", as opposed to computers/palm pcs.

 Some very cool stuff. Wait for the proper reviews though.

Kate

-- 
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