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UPGRADE
Speed kills - batteries, that is
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Columnist, 6/29/2000
EW YORK - There's no such thing as a computer that's too fast. Everybody knows that.
Well, not quite everybody. Indeed, the world's top chip makers are busily inventing clever new ways to make their processors run slower. Strolling the corridors of this year's PC Expo trade show, I encountered several examples of their recent handiwork.
These slower chips are made for portable computers, the kind powered by hefty slabs of lithium that generally provide only two to three hours of useful life. That's because it takes so much energy to drive the colorful flat-panel display screens and the multigigabyte hard drives, and the DVD drives for watching ''The Matrix'' on that coast-to-coast flight. They all eat electricity.
But one of the worst gluttons is the processor itself. Today's high frequency processors want lots of juice.
Much of it is wasted as raw heat. Desktop computers use fans and metal heatsinks to disperse the heat; use a laptop and your thighs become the heatsink. Even the lower-powered laptop processors made by Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. don't completely solve the problem.
But they're trying harder, with new chip designs that dial back on the processor's power consumption whenever possible. When you're playing a game or a video, the chip goes to full power; punch up a boring text document, and it drops back into cruising speed.
This isn't a new idea, but it's taken on new urgency for AMD and Intel, thanks to the most heavily touted chip start-up in years, Transmeta. That's the Silicon Valley company that got international headlines by hiring the world's most famous programmer, Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
Transmeta wasn't working on Linux software, though. It was designing a new chip called Crusoe that's designed to run Intel-compatible software while using just a fraction of the power consumed by Intel chips.
The first Crusoe-based computers are on display here, and at first glance, Intel and AMD have reason to be concerned. The prototype machines, from IBM Corp. and NEC Corp., are ultralight laptops that seemed to offer solid performance during my brief tinkering session.
Transmeta folk proudly pointed to an on-screen gauge that shows the processor leaping to its full speed of 533 megahertz when I started up a video player, then dropping down to 333 megahertz once the video is running.
The result, they say, is a minilaptop that'll run for eight to 10 hours before it needs a recharge.
AMD has responded to the challenge with a system that does pretty much the same thing. Its mobile PowerNow chips constantly speed up and slow down depending on the user's actions. AMD says PowerNow will make the battery in a full-sized laptop last about an hour longer.
For its part, Intel is offering a system called SpeedStep that automatically slows down its mobile Pentium III chips when a laptop is running on battery power. There's also QuickStart, a feature that makes the chip run flat-out when the user is doing something - typing, for instance. But the chip drops instantly into a power-thrifty ''idle'' mode when you pause for a second or two.
Transmeta chief executive David Ditzel says he doesn't much mind that rival companies are copying his company's slowdown strategy. ''Even at peak performance, we still dissipate a lot less power,'' Ditzel declares.
That's because of another Transmeta design trick. Instead of building Intel-compatibility commands into the chip, Crusoe stores them in software, and runs them only when needed.
That means Crusoe chips need fewer transistors, and thus less power. They're also smaller than a Pentium or AMD K6, and they run a lot cooler. The base of the Crusoe laptop I tested was barely above room temperature.
We'll find out later this year whether consumers will embrace Crusoe-based machines. But the company has already inspired a rethinking of the megahertz megalomania that's driven the industry for so many years. Of course, it would have happened anyway; as millions of us buy palm computers and Internet cell phones, battery endurance starts to matter more than raw horsepower. That's why so many chips now feature power brakes as standard equipment.
You can contact Hiawatha Bray at bray@globe.com
This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on 6/29/2000.
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