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Transmeta Crusoe
- asveikau 6y agoWhat I remember most about Transmeta was that they employed Linus Torvalds. This gave the name instant status and recognition among the Slashdot crowd and similar places.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoThe first Crusoe Product was a Sony Picturebook. Somewhere in Japan there’s a prototype of that laptop with Linus’ and others signatures, including mine. It’d be fun to try and track that down someday.
- robterrell 6y agoNot in Japan, but I happen to possess a prototype Picturebook and now I'm curious... Where did you sign it? Inside the case like the original Macintosh? Or on the outside?
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoGosh, it's been a long time. I don't remember for sure, but I have a faint recollection that I signed it in the O of SONY. But honestly, I don't remember.
- em-bee 6y agothe sony picturebook was my first personal laptop. a perfect travelcompanion. once i figured out how to install linux. and the transmeta cpu made it feel special even though as a user one doesn't really notice the difference.
- nostrademons 6y agoThey had a lot of crazy smart employees. Aside from Linus, one of Quake's authors worked there. And I had a Google coworker (who, while at Google, wrote the C++ framework that all their C++ webservers are based on, and also was one of the early engineers on Dart) who was a Transmeta alum, and had previously worked on Hotspot before that. It's one of those companies like General Magic and Symbolics that were complete failures in the marketplace, but are known for their alumni network. Even though the product didn't go anywhere, the tech that went into the product was incredibly impressive, and the engineers that built that tech are top-notch.
- lordgrenville 6y agoIn his book Just for Fun Linus talks a bit about the company and why he chose to work there.
- atgreen 6y agoI had one business meeting there, which included Linus and Steve Chamberlain, the creator of Cygwin. It looked like a fun place to work.
- guidoism 6y agoThat company was cool at the time. Their website was blank but If you looked at the HTML there was a comment saying “this page doesn’t exist” or something to that effect. I decided to see if sending an email to hr@transmeta.com would work and I got a reply and an interview and I was flown out to Sunnyvale. I thought I was the coolest person in the world at the time.
- guidoism 6y agoI also remember that something got messed up with my hotel reservation and I mentioned it during my interview and then I heard yelling. And um... I was still just a college student. It was a different world for me.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoThat’s how I got the job!
- mjg59 6y agoThe Crusoe was a brave effort that never really lived up to its promise. There was plenty of hype before the release (transmeta.com was, for a long time, a blank page with a hidden message in the source, which combined with them employing Linus left people hugely excited about what they were actually going to make), but what we ended up with was a low power but fairly slow x86 that had some exciting bugs (http://web.archive.org/web/20051202073851/http://www.cs.auc.dk/~fleury/bug_cms/ http://web.archive.org/web/20051202073851/http://www.cs.auc....). In the pre-JIT times, being able to run Java bytecode directly would have been a win, but it doesn't look like that was ever an actual produce and even then it was unclear whether you would have been able to switch between instruction sets at runtime fast enough to support a mixed Java/x86 environment. And before long, Intel had chips that weren't far outside the power envelope but ran much faster. It's a shame that the would only run signed CMS images - having a laptop you could switch over to running a different architecture would still be a very neat toy.
- FullyFunctional 6y agoI was there from 2001 until the end (roughly). History is written by the winners and outsiders tend to draw technology conclusions based business outcome, which is unfortunate and lacking in nuance. Crusoe at the time of the release was far more power efficient than anything Intel had to offer and was a revolution to the notebook market. Intel has officially credited Transmeta's LongRun as the motivation for creating SpeedStep. Performance of Crusoe ("Fred") fell short of the expectations as the approach assumed a faster VLIW core. CMS was very good, but couldn't compensate for the hardware. Had Transmeta not made terrible business screw-ups, the architecture could perhaps have had the iterations necessary the improve the technology. The third generation ("Tokomak") would have been significantly better and almost happened, except for ... business reasons. IMhO, the original approach has two flaws: 1. Software based interpretation of cold code leads to a dramatic performance difference that can be nearly impossible to catch up to for some applications. IOW, the difference between worst and best performance is much too big. 2. Out-of-order execution is a much simpler and better way to deal with cache misses. The tricks and efforts that went into the architecture to compensate for the in-order execution were mind-boggling and were part of the reason the core was slower than it should have been. NVIDIA's Denver improved (fixed?) 1. by added hardware acceleration for Arm decoding.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI worked on that as a QA Engineer. My favorite accomplishment was discovering that one version of a Crusoe-powered system would irrevocably hang while playing Tomb Raider 2 for between 15 and 45 minutes. It took an entire VLSI team over a week to debug that one. The problem had something to do with a voltage drop on a certain chipset. I also enjoyed discovering that HTTPS didn’t work on Internet Explorer 5.5, jump jets recharged at 10% the expected rate in MechWarrior 2, and a certain modem worked on PCI slots 1 and 3 & didn’t work in PCI slots 2 and 4.
- plerpin 6y agoWith strange failures like that, I'm surprised the system even booted at all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- FullyFunctional 6y agoPope was a QA engineer - that means he worked on systems that weren't qualified for shipping. Actual CMS bugs in a shipped device was extremely rare, but the big promise of Transmeta was that would _could_ ship fixes (and did, in at least one case). The perf impact of a CMS fix was typically trivial as it was fixing a translator, unlike an interpreter like the microcode in an Intel core.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI mostly worked on development boards that were the same size that you'd put in a regular AT/ATX case. I did some work on notebooks, too, both on prototypes & production models, too.
- FullyFunctional 6y agoI think I know you (Hi!), but my point is that by definition, QA's work is to find the bugs before the customers, so they don't see them. Talking about bugs you find without that qualifier might make people get the wrong impression.
- dfcarney 6y agoI worked at Transmeta for a short time (about a year) after my undergrad. I loved it. However, there was always a running joke that the stock ticker symbol should have been “HYPE”. It was sad to see things implode the way they did.
- robk 6y agoThis seems like the exact same story as Magic Leap among others.
- RantyDave 6y agoNo, not at all. Transmeta got a lot closer to nailing a much bigger market. They had actual products for a start. The problem was the underlying architecture was VLIW. Lots of people including Intel and Nvidia have tried to make it work and have been squarely bitten in the arse.
- FullyFunctional 6y agoAnd the failure of Transmeta was a business failure far more than a technical one. Had we not switched from working chip produced on IBM's fab, we would have had chips to give our customers who would have kept giving us money to invest in improved products ... EDIT: wording & typos
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoNow Russians (more precisely, Russian Government) are trying to use VLIW. Elbrus CPU seems to be an interesting device, able to emulate x86 at Core Duo speeds.
- ruslan 6y agoFYI. МЦСТ, a developer of the E2K CPUs has recently published an "Effective Programming of Elbrus CPUs" guide which describes its ISA. The document is in Russian. Link: http://www.mcst.ru/files/5ed39a/dd0cd8/50506b/000000/elbrus_prog_2020-05-30.pdf http://www.mcst.ru/files/5ed39a/dd0cd8/50506b/000000/elbrus_...
- gip 6y agoIntel was later more successful with VLIW. They bought Silicon Hive a company in NL that built VLIW for image processing. I had left by then but my understanding is that they were able to build actual products with it.
- plerpin 6y agoI knew a wannabe geek in high school who loved to brag about bullshit for nerd cred. My favorite lie was his boast about his dual core "transmeata crusoe" and how he morphed one of the processors into a 3D accelerator which made a GeForce unnecessary.
- api 6y agoI love how young computer people are just like young car people. "My VTEC is connected to my NOX and can run with super high compression, yo!"
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoThat would blow the welds off the intake manifold, especially if you granny shifting instead of double clutching.
- samcheng 6y agoI spent my hard-earned college freelancing money on a Sony Picturebook with this chipset. It was actually a really nice laptop! 8-ish hours of battery, and tiny. It had WiFi via a PCMCIA card, so it was great for the couch. The screen was really only big enough for a single terminal. Despite the reputation for instability / bugs, it was actually rock solid running Debian.
- Theodores 6y ago"This page is not here yet." was the Transmeta homepage whilst they were in stealth mode.
- jart 6y agoSee also the most impactful cpu no one's heard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NexGen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NexGen
- pgtan 6y agoMy home NIS server is HP T5510 thin client running on Crusoe: $ lscpu Architecture: i586 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 1 On-line CPU(s) list: 0 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core(s) per socket: 1 Socket(s): 1 Vendor ID: GenuineTMx86 CPU family: 5 Model: 4 Model name: Transmeta(tm) Crusoe(tm) Processor TM5700 Stepping: 3 CPU MHz: 798.025 BogoMIPS: 1596.05 t5510 ~ # longrun -p LongRun: enabled LongRun Thermal Extensions (LTX): active LTX setting: 75% reduction Current performance window: 0 to 100 Current performance level: 0 LongRun flags: economy
- saagarjha 6y agoCool! How long has it been running like this?
- pgtan 6y agoabout more than 5 years now. I bought it used on ebay for 1 Euro.
- saagarjha 6y agoDo modern Linux kernels still support the architecture, or are you just planning on running it in a configuration "that works" forever?
- FullyFunctional 6y agoFrom the POV of software, it's an x86, not some different architecture. That's the whole point. However, most distributions have stopped supporting x86 (32-bit) and only support AMD64 ("x64", heh).
- saagarjha 6y agoAh, yes, I am stupid. Carry on.
- close04 6y agoI miss my Compaq TC1000. Not for the performance but because it felt like I was "using the future" between the relatively novel 2-in-1 format and the CPU.
- fortran77 6y agoThis brings back memories! I worked for Colin Hunter at Hunter Systems which was the company before Transmeta. It was in a similar space. Their product recompiled DOS 8088 programs--using a similar "dynamic binary translator" as the Crusoe--so they can run on various Unix systems (68k, MIPS) as "native code". I worked on the thing that remapped the video screen memory to VT100 commands so you can see your Microsoft Word on a template. In a similar space today are these folks who figured out how to built an 8-bit CPU with only 17 TTL chips: See: https://hackaday.io/project/165950-cscvon8-an-8-bit-ttl-cpu https://hackaday.io/project/165950-cscvon8-an-8-bit-ttl-cpu This could have been built back in the mid 70s, there was just nobody smart enough to figure it out. It relies on a very simple set of instructions and microcode to implement the instructions of a more capable CPU.
- FullyFunctional 6y agoNo, we were as smart (if not smarter) in the 1970's but memory was WAY more expensive and the 64 KB the thing uses didn't even exit. Thus, all focus was on getting the most amount of performance out of the fewest bits. There are plenty of new TTL design like the above that conveniently doesn't work with original constraints.
- jeffnappi 6y agoI used a Fujitsu P2000 Lifebook in college back in ~2001, it was awesome. 6+ hours of battery life (pretty wild for that time) :)
- FullyFunctional 6y agoThe Lifebook I had could swap the DVD-ROM drive for an extra battery. I literally got 12 hours of battery life which at the time was incredible. It was a much loved notebook.
- jeffnappi 6y agoThat's right, I can't remember if I picked up the extended battery. But I do remember it had a modular DVD drive bay and a trackpoint style mouse.
- lph 6y agoThat brings back memories. I loved my Transmeta-powered Lifebook P1120 and used it well beyond its reasonable lifespan: A nine-inch laptop that predated the netbook craze and had a fantastic keyboard. I wish they made a modern version.
- hawflakes 6y agoDon't remember verifying with people I used to know that worked at Transmeta, but I recall they originally were going to for performance but then Intel decided to up their game. That's when they decided to push the power angle. Can someone correct me on the specifics? From another distant memory I remember a story from someone I knew at Transmeta bent over backwards on the Code Morphing Software to get a soft-modem (modem that used the CPU to do some of the work that traditionally would be done in an asic) to work with Crusoe. Sounded like a case of saving $2 on BOM (I'm just making up numbers) in order to get a design win.
- FullyFunctional 6y ago... I will say that the original goal was performance, but power efficiency was an [accidental] consequence and that because a focus. It had nothing to do with Intel (other than a general strategy of going after your competitions' weak spots). Soft-modem story is correct.
- dghughes 6y agoThe Transmeta Crusoe CPU reminded me of an article I read years earlier about powerful CPUs. The article said the upcoming Pentium would be so powerful you wouldn't need a physical modem it would be emulated in software. That blew my mind that hardware could be emulated inside software.
- edw 6y agoImagine a Beowulf cluster of these babies…
- erik 6y agoThat actually happened. https://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/11/19/2156246/efficient-supercomputing-with-green-destiny https://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/11/19/2156246/efficient-s...
- petermcneeley 6y agoOne important piece missing from this story: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/250776-intel-quietly-threatens-microsoft-qualcomm-x86-emulation https://www.extremetech.com/computing/250776-intel-quietly-t...
- rch 6y agoI had one of these in a Sharp Actius MM10, and I could write and compile C++ in Visual Studio for most of the day, using the oversized battery. When that time was spent sitting in a coffee shop I'd probably get 3+ people a day asking me about it, due to the size. It was an excellent device, and probably still ahead of its time.
- Multicomp 6y agoI had a Compaq TC1000 which was powered by one of these things. Needed a battery-powered stylus, the keyboard never really could hold up the slate / rest of the computer. Yet I used it nearly daily at school, since it was considered a 'study aid' because I took notes with the included Agilix journal system that came with Windows XP Tablet PC edition...right up until I discovered this thing called OneNote 2003 and well, let's just say that while the TC1000s themselves are in retirement on the shelf, Onenote is here to stay. All thanks to that funkily-named processor Transmeta Crusoe .
- MintelIE 6y agoSo did they get bought out by the NSA or something? It's weird how the whole company and everything else just disappeared.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoRussian Elbrus CPU appears to be a Transmeta on steroids. I am quite skeptical of the things made by Russian Government, but this seems to be a genuinely good device, able to emulate x64 at Core Duo speeds.
- thom 6y agoFor many years I had to resist the urge to buy an OQO, which ran on the Crusoe (and you may remember as the handheld PC from the sci-fi series Jericho): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO
- pantalaimon 6y agoLooks like it's GPU is fairly well documented https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1OdaokgXVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1OdaokgXVg
- thom 6y agoSo what you're saying is I'm definitely going to have to buy one, right?
- redis_mlc 6y agoI was the last engineering employee of Novafora, which bought Transmeta. Shortly after, both were wound down. Intel bought all the IP in a private auction for about $200k. (I was the other bidder, and hoped to Open Source the EDA tools.) The files were on a single old server, so not sure if anything still exists. I own the tapeout server (CS22 - quad-CPU Opteron with 64 GB RAM) used by both companies, which I plan to donate to the Computer History Museum. Transmeta only used AMD servers for some reason, I guess it was because they felt they were in competition with Intel. Kind of like how grocery stores don't want to use AWS because it would "pay the competition" (Amazon owns Whole Foods.)
- jl2718 6y agoHow strong is the IP position around the CMS?
- ridiculous_fish 6y agoAnother similar CPU is Nvidia's Denver. It was intended to run both x86 and ARM, but patents got in the way so now it's just ARM. Is there any merit to this design?
- a-dub 6y agoI remember Transmeta being the stealth startup that was super tight lipped about what they were working on back then. The skinnable instruction set stuff was really cool, but if I recall the only products that really made it to market were laptops with the x86 skin, where the coolest feature of them went largely ignored and they ended up seeing what market success they did because they had reasonable price/power/heat properties for low cost laptops.
- dmccunney 6y agoI have a Fujitsu P2110 with the Transmeta Crusoe CPU. It was passed along by a friend who had upgraded to a more powerful machine but didn't want it to go into the trash. She said it was "slow slow SLOW". Well, yes. The machine had 256MB RAM, and the Crusoe grabbed 16MB off the top for code morphing. It came to me with WinXP SP2. XP wants 512MB RAM minimum to think about performing. It took 8 minutes to boot, and longer to do anything once up. It did a good job of emulating classic mainframe "death by thrashing" You could get a daughter card to add 128MB RAM, but that wouldn't help in this case. (There was another daughter card for an earlier Fujitsu model that added 256MB, but I couldn't find confirmation it worked in the P2110.) I treated it as an experiment to see what performance I could coax out of low end hardware without throwing money at it. I swapped in a drive from a failed laptop, repartioned and reformatted, and set it to multi-boot. Win2K Pro SP4 actually ran, more or less, on the P2110, especially after I took everything out of startup that could be removed. I also installed two flavors of Linux - Ubuntu and Puppy, and FreeDOS. Puppy was designed for low end hardware, and Puppy itself worked well enough. Applications didn't. The speed bump was apparently the IDE4 HD. IDE4 was a BIOS limitation, so swapping in a faster drive wouldn't assist. Installing Ubuntu was a challenge. Xubuntu downloaded and installed, but performance was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums said too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and Ubuntu had a steadily increasing idea of what "low end" was. The recommended what I did - DL the Minimal CD and install from it. That would give me a working bare bones CLI installation, and I could use apt-get to pick and choose what else got added. Lubuntu got the nod as desktop GUI, and worked, though it was noting I'd call speedy. Puppy and Ubuntu were both installed on ext4 file systems, and mounted each other's slices when they booted. I spent some time arranging things so there was one copy of large apps shared between them. FreeDOS flew. The challenge with it was to get it to boot from grub2. I did, but have no idea which of the fiddles I tried actually made it work. Ubuntu provided another quirk. A new Ubuntu release came out. This one required PXE. The P2110 didn't have it. Installation proceeded normally, but things went to hell in a bucket when I reboted after install. Lack of PXE made installation of the new kernel fail, and that caused a cascade failure. I had to wipe the Ubuntu FS slice and redo from scratch, carefully stopping at the last release that worked and staying put. A test in the installer to insure that PXE was present before continuing and refusing to upgrade if not would have been nice. I assumed the Ubuntu folks just never imagined someone would try to install on a machine that lacked it. I got surprise email from a woman in Hong Kong who also had a P2110. She got the 256MB RAM expansion card, it worked, and she was running WinXP with acceptable performance. I tipped my hat in respect, but had retired the P2110. I was an experiment, the experiment was completed, and actual work got done elsewhere. I still have the machine, but haven't booted it in ages.