Transmeta's New Smaller, Faster Chips Announced

billstewart writes "Transmeta announced their new 5900 and 5700 CPUs. They're 50% smaller than the 5800, intended for low-power, low-heat, high-speed applications, and contain an integrated Northbridge. They're sampling now, production in January 2004, and expect to have a mini-ITX board out in 1Q04. The core chip is a 128-bit VLIW hidden by x86 emulation (as opposed to their new Efficeon, which is 256-bit VLIW.) The difference between the 5900 and 5700 seems to be L2 cache size. There are several other stories on Google News."

Yes, but what for?

[Sebastopol]

Has transmeta found a real design win yet? Something over 1m units is considered REAL. They've been issuing press releases since they started, and i have yet to see any success. i guess loads of venture capital are keeping them afloat, b/c their SECC filings show pathetic revenue.

I like the ITX idea

[ResQuad]

I am really lookin into getting myself a mini-itx board for my file server. This would be really nice to have, a nice speedy transmeta chip running the show.

Re:Care?

[eamacnaghten]

Linus is still employed by Transmeta.

Not any more. He now works for OSDL

Cheap, low power cpu's are great ...

[jubei]

Until you look at the prices for a typical mini-itx case.

I hope the mini-itx format becomes much more popular. We need more competition in the tiny case area.

Any good sources of reasonably priced cases?

Re:Care?

[Plammox]

It's scary to see how fast a company can lose its esteem among certian linux geeks just because "Linus doesn't work there anymore". Scary. And I thought the hallmarks of geekism were integrity, being objective and data driven...

Are you surprised?

[Kombat]

Actually my dorm room is usually noticably warmer than my common room because of the 4 computers I have inside.

Of course it is! You're running what are essentially 4 250- to 300-watt heaters in a small room. One computer would produce a noticable (heck, downright significant) increase in heat.

And by the way, while a lot of the heat coming from your PC is in fact from the computationally intensive components (CPU, RAM, video card), there is also a large amount of it coming from your power supply. There is 110V of AC power coming out of that hole in your wall, regardless of how many volts you choose to use. Since your PC only uses 12V (and 5V) of DC power, your power supply has to do work to convert it into something your computer can use. The transformer in your power supply steps it down and flattens it into a DC current, but doing so is not a perfectly efficient process. Quite a bit of heat is generated.

I've not seen any numbers to support this, but I'd guess that almost half (if not more) of the heat generated by a PC comes from the power supply alone.

Re:Transmeta in Laptops

[Coryoth]

For those of you wondering where Transmeta can be found (like I was), Here's a list of laptops


I thought it was interesting to note that most of the models of laptop linked to there are Japanese models. It seems the Japanese have embraced Transmeta, while the US is still "Intel inside" obsessed.

Jedidiah

Re:Never be slashdotted again!

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people are slashdotted because either their upstream link is saturated, or because their web page makes connections to a back-end database and the database takes time to fulfill requests or ends up with "too many connections" from apache. Any old desktop machine could serve static html pages and images forever without being slashdotted, and without needing a fat pipe.

Re:Care?

[dpilot]

It's a balance of purchase price vs electric cost. For my purposes (and electric rates) the breakeven point is just over a year between using my current cast-offs for a home server, and buying a new C3-based system.

But I'm unaware of bargain-priced Transmetas that would reach even the payback period of a C3.

Re:Cutting-edge desktops?

[mindriot]

Hmm, interesting. Someone should really do this. Make it a 2- or 4-processor Efficeon PC (8 would be a bit too many IMO) with accompanying energy-saving hardware around it, put it in a compact box, equip it with a well pre-configured Linux, and it might actually sell pretty well (OK, only among geeks, with Linux not being mass-market ready...). That would be one nice box. Low power consumption, proper performance, no fan noise while Transmeta's Thermal Extensions are active... I might buy something like that.