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Transmeta Hardware

Transmeta Introduces The Efficeon 231

Posted by timothy from the what-a-name dept.
brentlaminack writes "Information Week and others are reporting on Transmeta's new Efficeon chip. 1.1 GHz, 7 Watts, 1MB cache, 130 nanometer technology. A marked improvement over their previous generation. Let's hope they can capitalize on this before Intel starts filling the same niche. Looks like a nice product, Linus and Co." Update: 10/15 00:22 GMT by T : woobieman29 writes "Looks like this is a good day for high-efficiency processors. Hot on the heels of Transmetas announcement of the Efficeon, VIA Technologies has announced the release of it's latest low-power processor, the NanoBGA EDEN-N. Capable of running at 533MHZ (4 watts), 800MHZ (6 watts), and 1GHZ (7 watts) this appears to be a very good fit for Thin Client and other embedded devices. One really interesting feature is the on-chip Padlock security suite incorporating AES encryption."
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Transmeta Introduces The Efficeon More

Transmeta Introduces The Efficeon

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  • Let's change the name (Score:4, Funny)

    by l810c ( 551591 ) * on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @07:20PM (#7214211)
    Efficeon sounds kinda cheesy.

    Here's some alternatives : [reference.com]

    Ableon
    Activeon
    Adapteon
    Apteon
    Clevereon
    Defteon
    Efficaceon
    Handeon
    Potenteon
    Powerfuleon
    Shrewdeon
    Tougheon

  • Speed (Score:4, Informative)

    by NetJunkie ( 56134 ) <jason.nashNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @07:25PM (#7214301)
    I hope it's faster than the current chips. I have a Compaq TabletPC with the current 1GHz Crusoe and while functional, it isn't that fast. The Pentium low power chips are faster. Even doing normal daily business tasks I couldn't see using one as my main PC.

    • I have a Compaq TabletPC with the current 1GHz Crusoe and while functional, it isn't that fast.

      I was looking for someone to comment on the Crusoe chips... I know I had the same experience with the Via C3 chips, and expected the same from Crusoe...

      While a C3 processor may say it's 1GHz or so, it performs like it's not quite a 500MHz Intel/AMD chip. Funny thing is, the incredibly low power, just puts it on par with the 500MHz AMD/Intel chips that it performs similarly to.

      What I wonder is, why don't Intel

      • Hrm.. I have a C3 933Mhz system and it competes well against my 1Ghz Celeron system. What kind of uses are you seeing where it is falling short? I do run Linux on mine and haven't compared them when running Windows so maybe that could be involved? Do you have the same type and amount of ram in both systems? Configured along similar lines?

        Also my system uses a mini-itx mobo which from what I've read compliments the C3 processors to make up for some defeciencies of the CPU. Are you using such a mobo or a non
        • Can you run some benches on both and report your fpu and integer performance? You can say they feel about the same but benchmarks i've seen report otherwise. Not that I don't automatically find you unbelievable. I'd just like some proof... I'm sure others in slashdot would find it interesting.

          It's important to note that a celeron performs about the same speed as 400 mhz less pentium because of the cache in most instances.

        • What kind of uses are you seeing where it is falling short?

          Absolutely, positively everything.

          Videos that played fine even on older systems, couldn't keep up with th C3. Ghostscript processing, which used to take the exact same ammount of time, every time, took FAR longer on the C3. Mozilla/Netscape taking much much longer to startup than usual. System boot-up times significantly longer. X start/restart times noticably longer.

          I do run Linux on mine and haven't compared them when running Windows so m

          • Hrm, I'll see if I can run down somebody I know with a C3 on another mobo and see about doing a comparison. I remember reading that the mini-itx mobo was playing a major part in compensating for the CPU but I wouldn't think it'd be that much.

            Have you tried turning off swap space on both systems and seeing how they compare then?

            • Have you tried turning off swap space on both systems and seeing how they compare then?

              No, I really don't think either of the systems were even touching swap space (256MB of memory).

              And here's a classic from another thread both of us are on (might as well consolidate the conversation):

              Even fairly hefty tasks like unassisted dvd playback usually take the CPU usage to less than 90%

              I have to say, DVD playback shouldn't take a tiny fraction of that! You may say that the C3 feels fast, but your own facts in

              • DVD playback on the equiv Celeron system uses about the same in my experience. What more do you want from it? With hardware mpeg decoding then sure you can play a DVD on like a 300Mhz CPU easily enough. All in software though and it takes a much more powerful CPU.

                • DVD playback on the equiv Celeron system uses about the same in my experience.

                  Well, somehow, you have a very serious problem with your Celeron.

                  With hardware mpeg decoding then sure you can play a DVD on like a 300Mhz CPU easily enough. All in software though and it takes a much more powerful CPU.

                  No, there is no mpeg hardware required at all. DVDs will play well on a 400MHz system... Divx files will play acceptably.

                  On my 1.2GHz Celeron, my CPU utilization is more like 20% when playing back videos like

  • Let's hope they can capitalize on this before Intel starts filling the same niche


    and what exactlly niche is that?? drastically overpowered portables and underpowered desktop devices?
  • Efficeon, Pentuim, Escalade, Celeron, Infiniband, Duron, etc...etc...etc...

    Why not simply name a product for what it is instead of spending all those dollars to come up with lame names? Although I suppose that is the American way. Come up with some snazzy flash to sell a product based upon image rather than functionality.

    Personally I like product names that mean something like Apple Powermac G5 2.0 Ghz. That is descriptive, says who built it, something about what is inside and how powerful just like Po

    • Why not simply name a product for what it is instead of spending all those dollars to come up with lame names?

      Because somehow I don't think "Shitteon" or "Also-ron" would move many chips.

    • you do realise that both of those examples have names that don't in reality tell ANYTHING about the products performance more than intresting numbers which could have been just as well pulled out of any hat(or substituted with some funky name).

      sure, 911 turbo 3.6 tells that's it's a 911(but what does that tell you, without knowing beforehand what it stands for porsches?) and that it has a turbo and 3.6 engine(now, that doesn't tell much on it's own either since you still have to know the difference to a no
    • I want a PowerMack with a Pimpeon 5 processor.

      The ladies wouldn't be able to resist!

  • Green destiny (Score:5, Informative)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @07:32PM (#7214390)
    I once had a look at the giant Transmeta Cluster at Los Alamos called green destiny.

    the most impressive thing about it is how small it is.
    over 280 blades + disk server in a single rack.

    then you realize its sitting in an uncooled ordinary room shared by people. its not putting out hardly any heat the building air cant keep up with. its plugged into a normal building power strip, and its not making much noise.

    then you see the benchmarks. this thing runs faster than the equivalent pentium on scientific codes. How is this possible you wonder if its doing this code morphing. the answer is that the transmeta JIT code morph results in code that executes faster on the transmeta than the original pentium code. On scientific code with lots of long tight loops the overhead of the code morph goes away and it runs faster. (the opposite is true for GUI desktop apps where it is constantly jumping around and not spending time in small sections of code.).

    finally they show you the uptime. forever. no dead units. (on our other pentium cluster form the same manufacturuere we replace as mauch as blade a day)

    these things are way better price performance ratio than pentiums when you factor in the total lack of building infrastructure, and maintainence. low heat keeps them stable.

    • What I like about Green Destiny is that DOE is actually doing something about getting the most MFLOPS/Watt.

      For far too long supercomputing has been a business of paying incredible money for only logarithmic gains in performance.

    • Interesting, is it not? Similar benefits as server-side Java, or ASP.NET - the overhead of JITing is insignificant once you start optimizing common code paths. Incidentally, Mono's XSLT implementation is supposedly already faster than libxslt written in C.

      Which brings up an interesting question: official business and scientific benchmark figures. Chain as many Transmeta blade servers as needed to equal a given UltraSPARC/Xeon/Itanium2 server's power requirement, run load-balanced servers and benchmark.

      Pro

    • I went to a U Washington CSE collqium given by a guy from Google. Their clusters have such a heat issue that they can't keep the racks next to each other. Somebody asks why they didn't use Transmeta CPUs. I beleive the guy's response was that, even taking into account the additional space and cooling requirements, Pentium-based systems still cost less than Transmeta-based systems.

      This talk may be online...ah yes, here [washington.edu] (search for "Google") it is:

      Urs Hoelzle (Google)
      The Google Linux Cluster
      Windows [washington.edu]

  • Is it possible for an individual to buy a Transmeta processor plus a motherboard on which it can live?
    • Is it possible for an individual to buy a Transmeta processor plus a motherboard on which it can live?

      Not that I know of, unfortunately. I've looked (though only quick checks here and there, nothing very thorough), and found that you can either get laptops, SBCs, and blade-based servers, but nothing desktop-like.

      Really a pity, too... Although not as powerful as a typical desktop CPU, those of us running things like fileservers and/or internet gateways on our home LANs could benefit greatly from such a
      • For the application you're talking about, check out the VIA C3M266 motherboard - $65 at newegg, with integrated everything including USB 2.0, and the VIA C3 1GHz. (I got mine for about $28 at MicroCenter locally here in Cincinnati.) That's what I'm using on a couple of these machines - low power, decent performance, great uptimes. Also it's a uATX form factor so you can buy a nice small case.

        I like the idea of the TransMeta, but I doubt it can compete pricewise.
        • I'd rather use the VIA EPIA-V mini-ITX C3-533MHz.
          They've got more powerful versions of this, but those require a cpu fan.
          This one only need a passive heatsink. =)
          If you add a ide->compactflash converter and use one of their fanless 55w psu's you've got a machine with *no* moving parts.
          • If you add a ide->compactflash converter and use one of their fanless 55w psu's you've got a machine with *no* moving parts.

            BZZT! Wrong! It will still have moving electrons. :-)

            Besides, switching power supplies sometimes make high-pitched noise (at the switching frequency). But well designed systems have this frequency outside the audible range.

          • Why go for something so slow? The VIA EPIA ME6000 is also fanless, but it is powerful enough to play DVDs, MP3s, and MPEG 4's.

            I would personally prefer to wait for the Micro-itx 1ghz Edens with the full speed floating point units. Fanless AND powerful enough to do all my multimedia and serve as an emulation based console gaming system. Also the computer would be smaller than 5 CD jewel cases stacked ontop of eachother.

            Oh, and I am typing this from my EPIA Eden 5000, running Redhat 9. No moving parts e
        • decent performance

          I can't stand that. By what measure do they perform decently? They perform like several-year-old AMD/Intel chips at half their MHz...
          • By the measure that they can get the job done without hardly using up the available CPU horsepower? I've done a fair amount of testing of the C3 processors to find out how much they can deliver. Even fairly hefty tasks like unassisted dvd playback usually take the CPU usage to less than 90% even with a bunch of other stuff already going on (desktop, webserver, proxy server, mail client, etc). A Celeron CPU does about the same in my experience. Normal usage with the above mentioned desktop, webserver, etc on
          • By MIPs/watt and price/performance. Since this article is about the Efficieon (sp?) they seem like relevant metrics. My guess is the Transmeta would win in the MIPs/watt, but not in price/performance. (But this is an uninformed guess since I have never seen a Transmeta processor for sale retail.)

            BTW, I've used a 75MHz Pentium for the application we're talking about - firewalling/proxying. It's not a CPU intense job, and the C3 does fine for it. I'm also using it for NFS service inside my home, and it
    • I don't know. My Fujitsu Lifebook p1120 seems to have one :-). Whether you can get the mobo plus chip sans the rest of the computer is still an open question. That being said, this little machine is great (in no small part due to the low power consumption of the Crusoe) - built-in wi-fi, runs for 6 hours on its extra-life battery, and I put on Linux as a dual boot. The only downside is that I still can't find a touchscreen driver for the Fujitsu-made touchscreen...

    • Two Places To Look (Score:3, Interesting)

      by istartedi ( 132515 )

      First, try BWI.com [bwi.com]. There you can various types of boards that use the Transmeta CPUs (though Efficeon is probably not there yet). The most reasonably priced ones are made by Wincomm; but for some reason they aren't linked off BWI's main site any more. Last time I looked, I was still able to get the listing of Wincomm products by using their search function. Some projects such as the CharmIT wearable computer were based on the Boser HS-1600 board, which seems to be a popular choice. It costs something

      • Re:Two Places To Look (Score:3, Interesting)

        by TPFH ( 92944 )
        I remember durring California's rolling blackouts, weren't there some people blaming the internet; ie increased computer usage (instead of fraud) back then? Anyway, I remember thinking about the Crusoe chips and maybe it would make sense to build low power consuming desktop PCs.

        And you don't need power companies shutting down the power stations for fraud to motivate this. It is about time we start thinking of efficiancy in all walks of life. Yea, there are people that will actually use the power of a 2ghtz

  • Linus didn't leave, he took leave of absence (Score:3, Informative)

    by squashed ( 664265 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @07:43PM (#7214529)
    see article. [internetnews.com]

  • Slashdot editors are on crack (what else is new) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by illumin8 ( 148082 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @07:50PM (#7214599) Journal
    Today we have two stories that about new processors that are about to be released. The Transmeta processor, while an incremental improvement, is nothing to really get excited about. The Clearspeed chip is simply vaporware.

    Yet the one real story that is actually interesting "News for Nerds" was rejected by the Slashdot editors.

    Sun Microsystems today announced it's roadmap for Throughput Computing [sun.com]. Remember how Sun has been talking about putting multiple cores on a single chip? Well, systems will be shipping in early 2004 that offer twice the performance of current top-of-the-line Ultrasparc IIIi chips. By late 2004, they will offer three times the performance. Coming in 2005, the second generation of this technology will offer 15 times the performance of current Ultrasparc IIIi technology. The roadmap extends to generation 3 (no date yet), which will offer 30 times the current performance.

    This is way beyond Moore's Law and actually news that I want to read insightful Slashdot comments on.

    With the anti-Sun bias the Slashdot editors show I guess I shouldn't be surprised...

    [sarcasm]
    Vaporware and anything having to do with Linus Torvalds' old employer are ever so more important than something that will radically change the computing landscape over the next few years.
    [/sarcasm]
    • Sun is doing some interesting processor work... really different way of going about the processor race...

      But will they exist in 2004? They're in fairly deep shit revenue wise now, and I think their Solaris strategy is a losing one (i.e. I think they should dump solaris and start selling services and linux add-ons to make linux administration super easy).

    • [sarcasm] Vaporware and anything having to do with Linus Torvalds' old employer are ever so more important than something that will radically change the computing landscape over the next few years. [/sarcasm]

      You're new round here, aren't you? Seriously though, thanks for the link. Most interesting.
    • > The Clearspeed chip is simply vaporware.

      > Coming in 2005, the second generation of [Sun's] technology will offer 15 times the performance of current Ultrasparc IIIi technology

      According to Sun's press release, they will release hardware in "2005/2006" that is "expected" to increase throughput by 15 times for "Web, application serving, simple databases".

      > Vaporware

      "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
      • According to Sun's press release, they will release hardware in "2005/2006" that is "expected" to increase throughput by 15 times for "Web, application serving, simple databases".

        The 2005 number I took from this other link [sun.com], which you might want to check out. The goal is 2 years to produce a CPU with 16 cores on its die, which would give you the "15 times current performance" figure (you probably lose a little performance due to scheduler overhead). That would be right around October 2005, but you're rig
    • The in-depth reviews of the new ultrasparc(s) I've seen have been rather less ... flattering. A doubling of speed is not quite as impressive if you were way behind to begin with.

      As for `Coming in 2005 ... will offer 15 times the performance' -- what was that you were saying about vaporware?
    • Couple of problems with your link. First, you are linking to a press release - basically a marketing ploy by Sun saying, "Hey! Look at what we are doing! Don't forget about us!" Although it doesn't happen all the time, I'm sure the Slashdot editors would prefer to get links to other news sources instead of just links to corporate propaganda.

      Secondly, how is what they are developing with their chip multithreading technology any different from what Intel has already PRODUCED with their HyperThreading en

    • Excuse me? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Doktor Memory ( 237313 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:41PM (#7215075) Journal
      While god knows I'm the first to agree with the general sentiment that the slashdot editors are sucking the glass dick (see my sig, etc), are you seriously maintaining that the release of a white paper (ie: "We plan for our next generation of computers to be EVEN FASTER, woo!") detailing a series of products with no ship dates attached is much more important than a product that has actually shipped?

      The Efficeon (god, what an awful name) and the new Eden are both real products that I can now order in batches of 1 or more. The press release you cite is just Sun saying -- again -- that this time, really for sure uh huh they've whipped the UltraSparc's performance issues...in the next version...real soon now.

      • Re:Excuse me? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by illumin8 ( 148082 )
        ... are you seriously maintaining that the release of a white paper (ie: "We plan for our next generation of computers to be EVEN FASTER, woo!") detailing a series of products with no ship dates attached is much more important than a product that has actually shipped?

        I guess I should have included news sources [google.com] in my links, because there sure are a lot [cbronline.com] of [com.com] them [technewsworld.com].

        All sarcasm aside, your point is well taken. I like the article on the Sun site because it explains more about how the technology works than any o
        • Systems based on the processor are expected to begin shipping in the fourth quarter.

          In all likelihood the chip has been released, it's products based on it that have not.
    • While I strongly agree with you that Clearspeed is bullshitware, everything else is simply incorrect.

      1. A processor running at 1 GHz while dissipating only 7W of power is a major acomplishment (even if it's the speed equivalent to a Pentium 3 at 700MHz). It's not uncommon for a laptop processor to consume around 45W (i.e. half the total power consumption). 7W simply means that you have twice as much battery time ...

      2. Sun processors, taken individually, suck big time. Their power come from scalability (

  • Linus & Co (Score:3, Interesting)

    by chabotc ( 22496 ) <chabotc@ g m a i l.com> on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:09PM (#7214791) Homepage
    Small correction on "Looks like a nice product, Linus and Co". Linus has moved to OSDL [slashdot.org], so for now it's just & Co.

  • Is the cache pre or post code morph (Score:3, Interesting)

    by metalhed77 ( 250273 ) <`andrewvc' `at' `gmail.com'> on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:19PM (#7214863) Homepage
    I'm curious if anyone knows this (I know nothing about chips). But do transmeta processors use the cache to cache code before or after it has been code morphed? I saw the large cache and assumed that must be the reason as it would seem that increasing the amount of code that need not be recompiled would probably help out the transmeta chips quite a bit
  • Anyone else notice that Theo de Raadt was quoted in the VIA Eden-N press release? We're at the point now where PR departments of billion dollar hardware companies ask project leaders of open source projects for pithy quotes to improve their press releases. Quite a suprise... and oh my GOD is that VIA processor cool. Can't wait to see one.

    Or maybe the VIA website noticed Slashdot in the referer when I clicked to read it, and inserted quotes appropriate to the audience? :-)
  • Linus left Transmeta and is now at OSDL!

    -psy
  • That was the name of the bird that stole Baby New Year in the Christmas puppet-motion special, wasn't it?
  • Will they be higher priced than their current chips (a "size" premium) or will they be even lower priced (because they cost less to manufacture - probably)? Unfortunately, it seems Via's site has been /.'d...
  • Via's Nehemiah core (what a name!) is not as efficient as the modern x86 cores, so running an Eden at 1GHz is approximately the same as a P3 at 6-800 MHz, if you could buy such a thing.

    There are reviews (envynews [envynews.com] for example, against an Athlon 1900) which show the cpus at 1104:4696 for example, makeing the Nehemiah roughly the equivalent of an Athlon 450 (!)

    Now, the CPU has other things which make up for it, hardware-assisted mpeg-2 playback etc, so it can playback your VOB's and DiVX's even with its weed
    • Via's Nehemiah core (what a name!) is not as efficient as the modern x86 cores, so running an Eden at 1GHz is approximately the same as a P3 at 6-800 MHz, if you could buy such a thing.

      It's the C3 processor that now has the Nehemiah core. Eden is a different CPU altogether, and AFAIK less powerful per MHz than the C3. (To be precise, the Nehemiah version is called C3-2 to separate it from the older C3 with the Ezra core.)

      Now, the CPU has other things which make up for it, hardware-assisted mpeg-2 playba

    • Yeah VIA has hardware to assist in a lot of things you are likely to do, but can you use it? Last I checked the MPEG decoder was not supported by any program running on linux, so you have to run windows. Might not be a problem for you, but it is for me. (Not so much that I hate windows as I like to do everything myself, and that might one day mean I play with the source code to something)

      I too have ideas for what I would do with VIA (mini-itx) motherboards. Fortunatly for me, mpeg isn't of interest, bu

      • There have been steps in the right direction, though I'm not sure it's fully open yet. You can certainly get xine to play mpeg2's, but you may have to use the via-binary version.

        There has been a reverse-engineering of the binary-only module though, which I think is waiting to be integrated into the main applications.

        Simon
    • a P3 at 6-800 MHz, if you could buy such a thing.

      P3-600 (all models): http://tinyurl.com/r1nr
      P3-650 (all models): http://tinyurl.com/r1nz
      P3-667 (all models): http://tinyurl.com/r1oa
      P3-700 (all models): http://tinyurl.com/r1oh
      P3-733 (all models): http://tinyurl.com/r1oo
      P3-750 (all models): http://tinyurl.com/r1or
      P3-800 (all models): http://tinyurl.com/r1p9

      I'd say you could buy such a thing (yes, I used TinyURL addresses, but the Intel addresses are ~140 chars). Of course, I'd rather have a 1.4GHz P3, but

  • Speed? (Score:2)

    by pesc ( 147035 )
    So we have chips running at 1.1GHz, 553 MHz, 800MHz or 533MHz. And almost all people seem to think that these numbers are some kind of speed indicators, even at slashdot. Jesus!

    How about a link to some actual benchmark figures? Have anyone seen any? I just looked at SPEC [spec.org], but there was nothing there. What is the speed of these chips, really?

    As a side note, I believe that the really interesting news is that the new EDEN chips use a nanoBGA packaging and are to be used in the new nanoITX form factor which i

  • Let's hope they can capitalize on this before Intel starts filling the same niche.

    That's got to be in the running for the stupidest thing posted to the homepage, EVER.

    Why would anyone hope that Intel doesn't produce low-power chips at reasonable clock speeds? Cooling, efficiency, product life (less overheating and temperature cycling can't be a bad thing)... and this guy hopes Intel doesn't catch up?

    Transmeta hired Linus at one point. That's no reason to hope that Intel doesn't design a really low-power

    • Markets are interesting things. I want Intel to compete in the low power market because it lowers prices for everyone. (enviormentalists will also point out that a lower power CPU would be a good thing in general) However if VIA and Transmeta cannot get sales before the giant Intel crushes them with what they can do, in the end prices end up higher because there is less compitition.

      • if VIA and Transmeta cannot get sales before the giant Intel crushes them

        That's a verrrrry big if.

        Transmeta is going after a market that Intel doesn't really seem to care about. Examine the trend in power consumption from the Pentium through the P4. Intel doesn't seem to be showing much of a general interest in lowering power consumption.

        It would take a lot for Intel to start producing ultra-low-power chips. I really would be surprised if they decided to seriously consider trying to compete in that mark

  • I've been interested in getting a laptop for a while, but nothing i've seen in the market interests me. I don't need something fast - it's not like i'm going to be playing Doom 3 on it, just web browsing and text files and MP3s and maybe DivX at the most. So it can be pretty slow, 500mhz-1ghz at the very most. But I want the battery life to actually last a significant amount of time. Not this 2-3 hours crap. I'd also like it to be small and portable...not as small as a PDA, but just something with a ma

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