One last post:
I suspect the performance gap in real-world use will be a lot less than one might at first suppose. Clearly TM's emphasis on developing appropriate benchmarking awareness points to this. Most chips today spend much of their cycles bottlenecked on memory, I/O, busses, etc., so it is not inconceivable that Crusoe chips, which tend to have much larger caches since they don't need chip area for a lot of other hardware functions, will be very competitive in the performance department.
I got a different take on this after reading what's on the Transmeta site. Offhand, it looks like their performance just isn't that good, especially with the higher-perf chip 6 months off yet, so they're pushing the low power/ good enough performance angle, because that's all they got. Looking at what they report in transmeta.com, the one benchmark that shows any processor dependence in completion time is Office 2K, and the completion times listed are .133 hrs for Mobile PIII 500 mhz, .167 for the 6-months-out TM5400. Head scratching time there.
The larger cache thing isn't quite right either. From transmeta.com, the TM5400 has 256k L2 cache, same as the PIII. More L1 for the TM5400, but it's still a little funny. The chip size is 73mm^2 for the TM5400 vs. 106 mm^2 for the mobile PIII, so the Transmeta chip is about 1/3 smaller. It's true they could have bigger caches if they make the chip as big as the PIII, but that would cost them in other ways.
Finally, it's not like there won't be alternatives out there. From the ever cheeky Register last week:
AMD K6-III mobile may trash Transmeta on
thermals theregister.co.uk
Sources tell The Register that behind the scenes, there are very low thermal K6-III microprocessors using copper interconnect technology being developed and perfected at AMD's Dresden part, in Germany.
When the Dresden part ramps up, we are given to understand, AMD will be able to ramp up any number of K6-IIIs for mobiles. There are back room boys in an area of the fab in Dresden, working on mobile communications, we understand from our visit there last August. Some of them might even work for Motorola.
Well, it's the Register, and it's AMD, but AMD has been doing pretty well on delivering what they promise of late, while Intel has stumbled here and there. I don't know, it doesn't look like Transmeta has a real clear field ahead of them anywhere.
Cheers, Dan. |
