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To: phbolton who wrote (96740)	1/19/2000 4:20:00 PM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

phbolton, re: Transmeta Yes, the get close to 80% when running some office benchmarks - largely integer based. They don't support SSE or 3dNow - but support MMX. They don't show any FPU intensive benchmarks (wonder why)!! The chips will be priced in $120-350 range. They do include the northbridge on chip. Its a GREAT technical achievement. But performance is not very compelling. They were carefull to show the power reduction just for the chip. However as the CPU takes 20-30% of the system power even eliminating CPU power - although good doesn't solve the major problems. On the whole neither AMD/Intel have a lot to worry about. However they may do something in the internet appliance space vs NSM's geode chip. But they don't have NSMs integration (ie no graphics on chip) so even NSM may kick their butt. regards, Kash

To: phbolton who wrote (96740)	1/19/2000 4:45:00 PM
From: Saturn V	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Phbolton < About 80% performance at the same MHz sounds about right given the other info available. Some of the comments posted below refer to emulation that constantly converts one code into another. The transmeta does this only once per application which costs about one second. > I admit,I have a hard time believing the above statement. Emulation used to degrade performance by 10X. Power PC reduced it to 4x and claimed no degradation due to emulation! Agreed Transmeta has made several innovations to reduce the penalty, but given the past history I am a skeptic. In addition their emulator cannot emulate SSE which will limit its usage. The power dissipation numbers are impressive compared to a native x86 machine. However for notebooks this may not be an issue. Today the notebooks power consumption is dominated not by the processor ,but by the display, particularly for large screen active matrix displays. For mini notebooks or notebooks with passive LCD display,this will be important. I do see an opening for the mythical entity of "portable web appliances". People are struggling to define next generation products like advanced wireless PDAs etc. Transmeta should have a good shot at this, along with NationalSemi GEODE, Intel TIMNA, and INTEL StrongArm. Transmeta has significant innovations in emulation technology, but it remains to be seen if that can translate that into a killer product. Unless it can demonstrate something dramatic, the odds are against it, because of the enormous entry barriers in the x86 business. The sad history of the x86 wannabess will atest to that.