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> And I, for one, have not forgotten the rather impressive work he did at Transmeta. Not sure why this is always overlooked. The real-time code translation ap
by panpanna 7y ago
> And I, for one, have not forgotten the rather impressive work he did at Transmeta.
Not sure why this is always overlooked.
The real-time code translation approach where you have a cisc front end but the code executs on a risc core was immediately copied by Intel (and sued for that). Without that technology we would still be doing 200 mhz at 200 watt.
- earthscienceman 7y agoCan you explain in more detail what you mean? I literally know nothing about this
- panpanna 7y agoBack then Intel was stuck with a classic CISC architecture that did not scale well. What transmeta did was to keep the x86 instruction set (CISC) but internally convert them to a simpler RISC-ish instruction set and run it in a much simpler and power effective RISC core. Intel copied this idea which allowed P4 (maybe already PIII?) to make a giant performance leap. Nowadays all high performance CISC CPUs from AMD and Intel do this.