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Transmeta: A CPU Revolution That Never Was [video]

22 points by ingve 2y ago

recursivedoubts 2y ago
transmeta powered the thing i wanted most badly in the late 90s, the OQO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO good times
- windowsrookie 2y ago
  Around the time the OQO Model 2 was released the model 01+ was sold for super cheap (for the time). I was a teenager then and was able to buy one. It was a super cool device but ultimately too slow to really do much. You could play videos on it if you compressed them down to ~800x480, but I had a Palm TX and an iPod video that could do the same and the battery lasted significantly longer on those devices. Maybe if I had an IT career then I could have found a use for it. The transflective screen was pretty neat on it tho. In bright sunlight you could still see the screen perfectly.
- jrmg 2y ago
  I loved my Sony Vaio Picturebook. https://www.google.com/search?q=PCG-C1VN&udm=2 https://www.google.com/search?q=PCG-C1VN&udm=2
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ajross 2y ago
The basic idea was sound, and in fact is largely what modern devices have settled on: a core execution engine based around a uOp cache (that's the modern term; no idea what TM called it) and not raw instructions, which is fed by a decode layer that cooks the instruction down into dispatch-friendly (essentially VLIW-ish) variants that have already resolved most of the complicated pipeline dependencies. But: (1) Getting that to work with the transistor budget available to a 250nm chip is hard, and the value is comparatively low: there just weren't that many execution units to dispatch to! In some sense they were ahead of their time; Sandy Bridge ended up making it work almost a decade later. And more importantly: (2) Intel at the time was at the peak of its process ascendency. Transmeta might have made a competetive CPU at the circuit level, but not when their fabs were a full process node behind. NVIDIA and ATI, at the time, were having a ton of success in the industry because they weren't trying to compete with Intel.
- buran77 2y ago
  Transmeta also has 130nm CPUs [0] but they were all meant to be low power. The 130nm TM5800/5900 were ~9W at their highest 1GHz rating including the integrated northbridge. Clock it down to 800MHz and it was a measly 5-6W. That wasn't much power to work with, especially for a CPU that was doing the extra work for the code morphing abstraction layer. The similarly clocked Pentium IIIs going around the same period were ~30W. I had a Compaq TC1000 for some time and I while I loved it for it's exotic nature and interesting approach, it was slow as molasses. [0] https://datasheets.chipdb.org/Transmeta/pdfs/brochures/crusoe_for_embedded_applications.pdf https://datasheets.chipdb.org/Transmeta/pdfs/brochures/cruso...
sillywalk 2y ago
I remember around Transmeta was incredible, similar to the Segway.

22 points by ingve 2y ago

transmeta powered the thing i wanted most badly in the late 90s, the OQO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO good times

windowsrookie 2y ago
Around the time the OQO Model 2 was released the model 01+ was sold for super cheap (for the time). I was a teenager then and was able to buy one. It was a super cool device but ultimately too slow to really do much. You could play videos on it if you compressed them down to ~800x480, but I had a Palm TX and an iPod video that could do the same and the battery lasted significantly longer on those devices. Maybe if I had an IT career then I could have found a use for it. The transflective screen was pretty neat on it tho. In bright sunlight you could still see the screen perfectly.
jrmg 2y ago
I loved my Sony Vaio Picturebook. https://www.google.com/search?q=PCG-C1VN&udm=2 https://www.google.com/search?q=PCG-C1VN&udm=2

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ajross 2y ago

The basic idea was sound, and in fact is largely what modern devices have settled on: a core execution engine based around a uOp cache (that's the modern term; no idea what TM called it) and not raw instructions, which is fed by a decode layer that cooks the instruction down into dispatch-friendly (essentially VLIW-ish) variants that have already resolved most of the complicated pipeline dependencies. But: (1) Getting that to work with the transistor budget available to a 250nm chip is hard, and the value is comparatively low: there just weren't that many execution units to dispatch to! In some sense they were ahead of their time; Sandy Bridge ended up making it work almost a decade later. And more importantly: (2) Intel at the time was at the peak of its process ascendency. Transmeta might have made a competetive CPU at the circuit level, but not when their fabs were a full process node behind. NVIDIA and ATI, at the time, were having a ton of success in the industry because they weren't trying to compete with Intel.

buran77 2y ago
Transmeta also has 130nm CPUs [0] but they were all meant to be low power. The 130nm TM5800/5900 were ~9W at their highest 1GHz rating including the integrated northbridge. Clock it down to 800MHz and it was a measly 5-6W. That wasn't much power to work with, especially for a CPU that was doing the extra work for the code morphing abstraction layer. The similarly clocked Pentium IIIs going around the same period were ~30W. I had a Compaq TC1000 for some time and I while I loved it for it's exotic nature and interesting approach, it was slow as molasses. [0] https://datasheets.chipdb.org/Transmeta/pdfs/brochures/crusoe_for_embedded_applications.pdf https://datasheets.chipdb.org/Transmeta/pdfs/brochures/cruso...

sillywalk 2y ago

I remember around Transmeta was incredible, similar to the Segway.