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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cirruslvr who wrote (88086)	1/19/2000 2:21:00 PM
From: Charles R	Respond to of 1577996

Cirruslvr, <We still don't know how well it emulates X86 code so 500 or 700MHz may or may not equal AMD/Intel 500 or 700MHz.> We don't know but I would be surprised if it is better than a 300 or 400MHz AMD/Intel equivalent. < But that 1W figure is sure to win them a few design wins.> I doubt that too - at least as far as mainstream PCs are concerned. Couple of reasons: 1. Processor power consumption is only a fraction of the total laptop power dissipation. So the system level savings by going to Transmeta solution may not be that much. 2. Laptop makers have increased the thermal envelope last year to accomodate 12W AMD chips (some very sharp marketing from AMD). Looks like SpeedStep/Gemini may push that envelope further out. Now, if the laptops are being designed to accept higher power CPUs, what would the OEMs get by going to lower power? Intel/AMD could conceivably add a low power mode that uses active power management and runs at say 1/3rd clock, be competitive in performance, and nullify any advantage that Transmeta has. I can see a possibility for non-standard platform but that is not exactly a competition for AMD or Intel. Chuck P.S.: So far I have not heard of SSE or 3DNow support from Transmeta. If they don't they may have yet another problem.

To: Cirruslvr who wrote (88086)	1/19/2000 2:27:00 PM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577996

Cirruslvr, Re:"transmeta" Well I sat through the 2hr BS session. My thoughts: They waffled on the benchmarks - very obviously - CLOCK SPEED is very high yet effective throughput is pretty low. Very good for apps like DVD playback where you have repetitive stuff - due to the trandslation cache. They don't support 3dNow or SSE but support MMX - ho hum. Chips priced at $200-350 seems like a huge price for effectively 60% of a PIII 500 mobile. On their smaller chip that looks interesting. But I would expect folks like National with Geode to be likely competitors. And National will run windows today while their chip runs mobile linux in rom. Overall BRILLIANT marketing but not much meat. Technically the code morphing and power management was very elegant. regards, Kash.