Sarkie -
This here is my understanding and speculation, I'm not 100% sure.
Transmeta is a company working on a new type of microprocessor. Basically they are designing a chip that can analyze a machine language to figure out how to execute the code for it. Sort of a "meta-processor". So programs define their own instruction sets, more or less, which can draw from available resources in the CPU such as a memory system, cache, register banks and windows, arithmetic units, floating point units, I/O units, etc.
Supposedly this one chip can run the instruction sets of the x86, Motorola, Sparc, and more - and they aren't implementing them in hardware. You basically give the processor the specifications of whatever instruction set you want to use and it will reconfigure its hardware to operate on that set of instructions. Cool, eh? A very interesting idea, though not entirely new. Computer scientists and engineers have been theorizing about chips that reprogram themselves for quite a while - one way is to build the processor as a big parallel network of nodes, each of which take data, do something with it, and pass it off to another node, and the function of each hardware node can be reprogrammed for different instruction sets. Apparently this group of people is taking on the challenge of actually implementing one, though I don't know what tack they are taking and neither will anyone else until they release some more info!
I am unsure of the extent of Paul Allen's investment in Transmeta, but I thought I read somewhere that funding from Vulcan had sort of tapered off and Paul was "sitting on the sidelines". But I could be totally wrong - I probably am.
-G |
